Glasses help you see, hearing aids help you hear, basic statements like that make it seem like both objects essentially serve the same purpose. We even occasionally see hearing aids advertised as the glasses for your ears! Unfortunately, it’s not so simple, hearing aids and glasses and quite different. Yes, they are both worn on your head and supposed to provide correction (not a cure), but that is where their similarities end.
Even the most advanced hearing aids won’t restore your hearing 100% the way another person can hear naturally. Glasses can restore your vision to 20/20. Hearing aids do a great job of mimicking what our ears are supposed to do, but they aren’t perfect, they are just a substitute for the original.
Glasses and contacts are made in different powers to compensate for eyes that have refractive errors (sorry Eye Doctors for the oversimplification). Once the necessary power is determined and the lenses are put in the frames you leave with the glasses and don’t need to come back until your vision gets worse.
Hearing aids are designed to give your ears different amounts of amplification at every frequency because your hearing loss varies between the frequencies. A hearing aid must also vary the amount of amplification depending on the intensity of the sound at that frequency. Once a hearing aid has been selected and fit it is common to come back for periodic adjustments. Even then, the best-programmed hearing aid will not give a person “20/20 hearing” in every situation. The science of hearing aids has advanced enough to give millions of people the ability to hear the sounds in their lives as naturally as possible, but they are still working to perfectly replicate the intricacies of the auditory system.
Another major difference is that your hearing will not get worse because you are wearing a hearing aid (unless it is improperly programmed). Glasses, on the other hand, do some of the work for the muscles in your eye. The more you wear your glasses the more these muscles get lazy and the more dependent you become on your glasses. Hearing aids are designed to stimulate more nerves in your ear than your natural hearing does on its own. The brain starts receiving more signals from the nerves, which means your brain is actually working harder and is less likely to get lazy like your eye muscles.
Hearing aids are not like glasses when it comes to mechanics. One way we wish they were more alike is when it comes to stigma. Billions of people around the world wear glasses and no one thinks of them any differently. For some reasons hearing aids have not become as mainstream. We hope this changes in the near future.
If you are having trouble hearing, we hope you will let us help you. Give us a call at Purchase Ear Technology in Paducah at (270) 558-3996.