Profoundly deaf man scores over 90% speech recognition with hearing aids!

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deafdude1

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(Case study, year 2008. He did get a CI eventually in right ear.)
(for hear again, his audiogram shows 95db HL at 250Hz in both ears and over 100db HL in the higher frequencies)

This just goes to show that hearing aids most certainly are not inferior, well unless you happen to have a 115db or 120db hearing loss. My audiologist doesn't recommend CIs for me or anyone hearing equal or better than me, but did say that no HA will ever aid a 120db loss or if there's no residual hearing left, such as with cochlear dead zones.

He didn't mention what HA he was wearing but it's possible he wore the Phonak Naida V UP HAs(and if not, an equivalent from a different brand). I wear those too and got them in 2008. Right now I am able to understand 70% to 80% of what my dad says in the car and that's with much worse aided scores than what ive shown in the chart below(im getting my HAs reprogrammed for max gains and to enable transposition) so it's not too much of a stretch that he could score 90% in noise(and I might be able to match his scores). He did say it took alot of training, but nothing wrong with that and besides a CI would still require alot of training!

His hearing loss is progressive but he held off getting a CI for a very long time, instead doing the right thing by trying all the best HAs and maxing the gains. He did mention that he was taking a big risk getting a CI, but figured that he always has the better left ear and also even if CI was worse than HA, in a few years itll become better than HA because his HL was progressive and HAs won't benefit him after a few years. He probably felt that today's CI technology was "good enough" to risk the worse ear and hope he gets lucky with the CI results.

Well he did get lucky but how much can you improve when you are already hearing great with the best HAs with max gains? His speech recognition improved a few percent and is now over 95% while it was over 90% with both HAs together. He did get the biggest improvement with CNC but CNC doesn't usually reflect real world converstations, HINT would most closely reflect this which he was already over 90% to begin with.

There is way too much hype with CI recently. It is being pushed as the "latest and greatest" by audiologists, ENT and surgeons. They are probably forcing insurance companies to pay at least 80% of the $50,000 tag that CI carries. I really wish insurance companies would pay for HAs and for audiologists to work with the person to program the HA so he or she hears the best. The man who got the CI even mentioned in his case study that everyone should be training themselves to understand speech with HAs first and that it's no different from CI, both are simply tools to give the deaf access to sounds and speech.

Then this begs the question, why take the risk with CI and it's associated surgery? As long as you are getting benefits from HAs, stick with them! Even the profoundly deaf can benefit just fine with today's HA technology. It's simply a matter of choosing the right HA, having a skilled audiologist program and reprogram your HAs and getting speech reception training. This is possible even with unaided hearing as bad as mine and his. Of course if your unaided hearing is something like 115db or 120db at 1000Hz and NR above that and still 90db or worse in the low frequencies, it's going to be very difficult if not impossible to be able to score better than 40% speech reception which is the cutoff for CI candidacy.

I will repeat that I am not against CI, but only advise that you be realistic about what CI can do and can't do. It's not a cure or a miracle, but just another tool to aid the deaf in sounds and speech. Over 90% of the profoundly deaf still have some residual hearing left that would be amplified with HAs and thus provide access to sounds and in most cases, also speech. There's always other options such as lip reading, ASL and writing for anyone that ever has any difficulty understanding others.
 
:roll:

Again, each of us hears differently. Just because one person who is profoundly deaf can understand a majority of speech with hearing aids doesn't mean everyone can.
 
deafdude1- What type of hearing loss does the guy have (sensorineural, conductive, etc.)? That also plays a factor as well.
 
:roll:

Again, each of us hears differently. Just because one person who is profoundly deaf can understand a majority of speech with hearing aids doesn't mean everyone can.

I understand this and never said everyone can. Even I am not sure I could score as high as he, but I will make every effort to work with my audiologist so he can reprogram my HAs to hear the most environmental sounds and speech. I will accept whatever additional improvement I get from my HAs. My parents did comment that since ive been training, my speech reception has been improving. So yea everyone should be willing to put the effort with HAs and work with their audiologist.

deafdude1- What type of hearing loss does the guy have (sensorineural, conductive, etc.)? That also plays a factor as well.

Obviously sensorineural. Conductive losses would never be profound and even if it was, he would have gotten a BAHA instead of CI(which by the way barely improved his speech reception over his HAs) Also see my response to you from another thread(do a search for my posts)
 
I understand this and never said everyone can.

Posting this information here only gives people the false impression that they have the ability to understand over 90% of speech when this isn't the case for many people who are profoundly deaf.
 
I understand this and never said everyone can.

Posting this information here only gives people the false impression that they have the ability to understand over 90% of speech when this isn't the case for many people who are profoundly deaf.

I give no false impressions, this isn't intended. I only wanted to show a case example. I don't yet know what percent of profoundly deafs can score this high, just that it's possible. Do note you can't score above 40% for a CI, I don't understand how his surgeon was still willing to give him a CI. Must be the lax standards.
 
Do note you can't score above 40% for a CI, I don't understand how his surgeon was still willing to give him a CI. Must be the lax standards.

Wrong. In order to qualify for a CI, a person must understand 60% or less of speech in their better ear and 40% or less in their worse ear.

I'm sure there are CI surgeons and audis who are lax in their judgement about who should and shouldn't be implanted, but that doesn't mean they all are. My former CI audi made me take 2 individual hearing tests (a standard hearing test and an ABR) during my first CI evaluation. The first hearing test was to get a baseline as to what I could hear and the ABR was to confirm these results and rule out auditory neuropathy given my premature birth history.
 
deafdude,

Why not post the excellent results people have had with CIs?
 
He has Progessive hearing loss, he/ENT probably wants to keep his speech discrimation up to par (possible because of his job) so they probably doesn't want to waste time by waiting for his hearing to drop further, loosing bit of speech discrimation with delay in waiting for CI.
 
Those scores are pretty cool ! I wish him the best success. I won't be like others on here who constantly feel a need to prove everyone else wrong, even if each of us hears differently. If he does that well with his HAs, then hats off to him. Thanks for posting the info, deafdude! :)
 
deafdude,

Why not post the excellent results people have had with CIs?

Interestingly enough, you're asking the OP to go off topic. His original topic/post was "Profoundly deaf man scores over 90% speech recognition with hearing aids!"

Stop asking for attention to CIs in every post. I, of course, have nothing against CIs because I was going to do this for myself last fall, but not every single post in the deaf forum has to have anything to do with CIs. Can't this thread be about HAs, as the OP stated? :roll:
 
deafdude1 said:
Profoundly deaf man scores over 90% speech recognition with hearing aids!

:shock: I'm jealous, I'm so impressed-- in fact I never known someone who had scored over 90 percent on speech recognition with their hearing aids not in my knowledge. WOW!! :lol:
 
Interestingly enough, you're asking the OP to go off topic.

Deafdude posted information about someone who scored over 90% speech discrimination with hearing aids. He also mentioned CIs in his original post. I responded by saying not everyone can benefit from hearing aids in the same way this person can. With that being the case, my posts were not off-topic.
 
He has Progessive hearing loss, he/ENT probably wants to keep his speech discrimation up to par (possible because of his job) so they probably doesn't want to waste time by waiting for his hearing to drop further, loosing bit of speech discrimation with delay in waiting for CI.

:gpost: Charlotte. Some people in this thread seem to be forgetting that.
 
Deafdude posted information about someone who scored over 90% speech discrimination with hearing aids. He also mentioned CIs in his original post. I responded by saying not everyone can benefit from hearing aids in the same way this person can. With that being the case, my posts were not off-topic.

It's plain as day that the point of the OP's post was to talk about a profoundly deaf man who scored over 90% speech recognition with hearing aids, even if CIs are mentioned in the same article (which he eventually got a CI.) That was not the point of the OP's post. The title says it all.

Nothing to stop you from starting your own thread titled "Why not post the excellent results people have had with CIs?" (Actually there's a few already as it is.) It would be nice to hear from others in this very thread who can simply talk about their speech discrimination *WITH* HAs instead of turning this into another pro-CI thread.
 
It would be nice to hear from others in this very thread who can simply talk about their speech discrimination *WITH* HAs instead of turning this into another pro-CI thread.

No one is stopping another person from discussing speech discrimination with hearing aids. I'm certainly not. If people wish to continue discussing that aspect of this thread, they can always ignore my posts.
 
I don't yet know what percent of profoundly deafs can score this high, just that it's possible. Do note you can't score above 40% for a CI, I don't understand how his surgeon was still willing to give him a CI. Must be the lax standards.
Yes thank you deafdude.
I think that standards should be tightened up a bit. Not so that it becomes very difficult to get CI, BUT just so that the people who think latest tech= better hearing are screened out. I'm not saying that people pursue CI b/c it's a fad or trendy. But there are people who are programmed to think newest tech gizmo= better performance. Granted this isn't limited to CIs....I remember a lot of hype about digitals back in the 90's. ....and then there's all those people who NEED the latest cellphone or I-gadget or gizmo.
Yes, the CI is damn amazing for someone who gets little to no benifit from traditional hearing aids.
 
Obviously sensorineural. Conductive losses would never be profound and even if it was, he would have gotten a BAHA instead of CI

Deafdude,

It is simply not true that conductive losses are never profound.

I had radical mastoidectomy surgery on my left ear when I was nine, due to an aggressive infection which threatened my life. The surgery involved completely changing the anatomy of my ear canal, ear drum and middle ear, including the removal of all but a very small section of one of the ossicles, the tiny bones which conduct sound through the middle ear. I also had a significant proportion of the mastoid bone behind my ear removed, leaving me with a hole behind my ear. Because of this surgery I have a severe/profound hearing loss, with hearing thresholds ranging from 80 to 105 Db. I consider myself fortunate to have retained some hearing, my uncle who underwent the same surgery several years previous to mine was left totally deaf in the affected ear.

I am not a candidate for cochlear implantation because of the nature of my hearing loss, neither can I have reconstructive surgery of the ossicles, because I now have an open cavity where the middle ear used to be. My right ear was also severely damaged by infection, I have a severe hearing loss in that ear, with thresholds ranging from 70 to 95 Db.

I depend on bilateral super-power air conduction HAs. I could have BAHAs, but they are usually kept as a final reserve for when standard air conduction hearing aids are ineffective or cause significant infection.

I have been following your threads over the last few weeks, and it seems to me that you do not have sufficient knowledge to support some of the statements you make. You can not use your own experience and think it applies to everyone else!
 
Conductive losses would never be profound and even if it was, he would have gotten a BAHA instead of CI

Not necessarily. I know 2 people who had conductive hearing loss and received a CI.

In fact, one of them is a member of AD.
 
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