Silent strike as a protest

deafdrummer

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Hello everyone,

I'm seriously considering the possibility of starting a "silence strike," in protest of there not being currently-made analog hearing aids available in the US (I was just told today by another audiologist that supposedly, they are still available, but I wasn't able to confirm that they are still made at least by a skeleton crew at one of the factories for a particular brand).

I'm collecting information at this point to determine why the makers stopped making them, whether it was a legal decision based on a Federal Mandate (I vaguely recall something about this), and to protest the fact that the older, hard-of-hearing-from-age crowd has unfair control over the design outcomes of hearing aids, which are not applicable to broad-spectrum-range deaf individuals who simply need basic amplification without any of the sound processing features that have become part of digital hearing aids. EVERYTHING I've tried doesn't work for me.

Where do I get started? I imagine that if I keep this up, there will eventually be a lobby group to go to Washington, DC, to lobby for the hearing aid manufacturers to be forced to return the analog HA making status to active again and make them available again. I'm practically 98% deaf with my current digital aids (Widex Dream 440) in spite of the extensive features modifications over the past 3 years. There is so much feedback that I have to turn them down all the way, and even then, still some feedback occurs. At that point, I had a white east Texan lady, who should be easy to understand, ask me if I had something in stock, and I could not make out the word at all. It was "strainer" as in a hand colander for straining liquid out of something you're cooking. I couldn't hear the "s" and the "r" at all. A crowd in a large room talking doesn't sound like a room of people talking all at once, and I can't understand most of my Indian friends in there at all. It didn't used to be this way with analogs.

I'm willing to head up this effort to make sure appropriate HAs for profoundly deaf people are made available again.
 
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