Below is a re-post of one I made in another earlier discussion of hearing aids.
BTW, I have bookmarked the site Bill just posted, looks to have reasonable possibility. Thanks Bill.
I realize that many people are quite self conscious about anything of a visible support nature but need not be. For my part if I need a cane (I did for a time) I grab a cane. If I decide that I need a hearing aid I'll just get one. I have done some homework on them before and quite frankly for me I would look closely at what is called a "body worn" hearing aid. It's basically like the old original hearing aids where the electronics are in a small box in a pocket or belt clip and usually has a wired ear-piece. They actually have several potiential advantages like huge battery capacity which allow more powerful electronic functions etc and cheaper batteries. They can be a good choice for folks with the most serious hearing losses due to the power available. They can also be quite inexpensive to buy if a lot of fancy stuff is not needed or if it is just used part time. I have a BIL that only wears his for meetings at work.
It is all a very individual thing.
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As I type this I am being kept company by a few hundred crickets... Not really, just my tinnitus. It has gotten a lot louder in the last year so I went researching and yes it can be a side effect of my thyroid medication. Oh, joy...
I have long had a minor level of hearing loss. Not serious but some people I can hear from across the room with their back to me and some I can't hear well from 3 feet away and looking at them.
In addition to a lifetime running a lot of very noisy farm equipment I spent a few years in a factory room with hundreds of pneumatic cylinders of all sizes. They ranged from little ones that would fit in the palm of your hand to larger ones that were about a 4" bore and a 24" stroke. That was in the early 1960's and none of them were muffled. It sounded like a shooting range in there all day except when we shut down for break and lunch and shift change. When we shut down the silence was deafening... Really spooky. The thought of any form of hearing protection was totally alien there. It just was not done. Different times.
Now about aids... I would have no fears of someplace like VA (except that I do not qualify, not a vet) or one of the hospitals etc. but I am here to ring a warning about "hearing aid sellers"...
We once shared a building (with a thin wall) with one and there was never a bigger shyster and fear monger on the planet. That building had strange acoustics. I had occasion to listen from his side a couple of times and he could hear nothing from our side but from our office we could hear (very plainly) anything they said over there.
He was there to sell hearing aids period. Need didn't enter into the equation, anyone that walked into his door "needed" a hearing aid regardless of the phony testing he supposedly did. He had a very standard patter where he really pressured mostly old people largely by repeating the same crap over and over telling the "victim" that if they didn't hear well "everybody" would think that they were "stupid". And he really laid into the word stupid... Usually repeating it several times.
His receptionist was a retired bookkeeper but he would not let her see his books. She was a fairly outspoken old gal with a lot of spirit and she would at times start taking him to task for his ways. One year they had a little Xmas party with the two of them and a half dozen other people. The next day she really laid into him. It seemed that he drank a little too much and told everybody that he only had to pay $13 each for those base model hearing aids that he was selling for $300 to $500 (this was back in the 1980's). She also was taking him to task for sticking so much money in his pocket and never writing anything down... She claimed that he was only reporting less than 10% of what he took in and as a lifetime bookkeeper it did not sit well with her. She even expressed worry that she might also get in trouble since she had to know what he was doing.
I never did hear what he was paying for the aids he was selling for thousands but I'll bet that it was not a whole lot more than what he paid for the cheaper ones.
You do not always "get what you pay for"...
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