Arizona Hearing Center October 2019

Arizona Hearing Center October 2019

2627 North Third Street, Ste. 100, Phoenix, AZ 85004 | 14418 West Meeker Blvd., Bldg B, Ste. 102, Sun City West, AZ 85375

OCTOBER 2019

602-277-4327 | AZHear.com

How to Talk to Your Patients About Hearing Loss It’s Time for a New Approach

A common misconception about hearing aids is that people are too vain to wear them. I hear this time and time again, usually from everybody but the patients themselves. Sometimes I think family members use the vanity excuse upfront because they don’t want to have a conversation about hearing loss with someone they look up to. The bottom line is we don’t do a great job talking about hearing loss in a familial context, so we find reasons not to talk about it at all. And the discussions we have in a medical context aren’t that much better. Physicians struggle to broach the topic of hearing loss for the same reasons regular folks do. We have created an unusable discourse for treating the issue, where avenues lead to frustration, delay, and hard feelings, so it’s no wonder we don’t pursue them in the first place. I’m willing to bet you’ve heard a patient tell you their hearing loss is solely their own problem. They think since they’re the person impacted by the failing hearing, it’s up to them to decide what to do about it. Conversation over … or maybe not. Perhaps they rely on their spouse to communicate for them outside of the home, so they still function almost as they did before hearing loss. Already, you start to see how hearing loss doesn’t just impact the person who’s suffering from it. Hearing loss affects

everyone who has to interact with the untreated person. If we don’t communicate this to patients, we are doing them a disservice. Another common problem with the way we discuss hearing loss is relying only on real-world experiences rather than using a >Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4

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