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The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

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Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#211

Post by comeonseriously »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #165
JCM9 wrote: post #55

There are a number of healthcare areas in the US that have been protected by regulation, but it’s increasingly unclear if this is good for patients, consumers, or public health at large. The increasing sentiment seems to be probably not. Vision care is another area I’d expect to see more changes and disruption coming down the pipeline. Vision care is very important and advanced cases require special skills, but it’s…

Evaluating someone's eye for glasses can be done entirely by machine as can manufacturing the glasses themselves. I do not understand why we still force people to spend 5-10 minutes sitting in a chair in a dark room going "better....no...worse...better..."

Because an eye exam isn't just about the final prescription. It's about whole eye health (retina health, cancer, cholesterol, diabetes, etc).

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#212

Post by 0des »

jtwaleson wrote: post #123
0des wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it's not glasses, I just go to the website and punch in my measurements, pick frames and they arrive shortly after.

Afaik you need a valid prescription by law in the US. This might not be strictly enforced or verified by the retailers.

I'm curious which law that might be. Is this something you've run into legal issues with in the past?

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#213

Post by falcolas »

slownews45 wrote: post #181

Fantastic news. If you can afford the $5,000 - great! The current system works for you. 80% of people cannot and so are stuck. For folks with mild/moderate loss (where a LOT of people don't get help) something as simple as letting Apple tweak noise cancellation to be voice enhancing and providing a tuning and hearing test app in the iphone would be a godsend. The elderly miss out on a lot of family life because of he…

FWIW, there is a nuanced difference between hearing aids and iPods. Hearing aids basically apply a hearing-capability matched EQ to the incoming sound.

Why this matters: Hearing loss is not uniform across frequencies, and we use huge portions of the spectrum for different functions (truck backup beepers vs. car engine noises, both used to identify what's coming your way).

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#214

Post by germinalphrase »

jrace wrote: post #128

How much would you pay for: *Hearing test * Hearing aid fitting * Usage counselling * Follow up adjustments * Annual retest of your hearing * Replacement of lost hearing aids * Unlimited repair for 3 years ?? ====== I got out of the Audiology field in 2015. At that time all the above was included for every hearing aid we sold (Prices varied from $750 / ear - $3600 / ear. When I was in that field many companies tried…

“ Sadly, most people wait too long before trying a hearing aid, and give up because they hear too much noise.”

Are you suggesting that getting hearing aids preserves your hearing or simply that people with advanced hearing loss benefit less from them?

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#215

Post by comeonseriously »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #145
mixmastamyk wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duped, because they are doing it the old-fashioned way?

Because they are making theater to justify their cost.

Did the machine tell you if anything else was wrong with your eyes? Could it?

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#216

Post by jrace »

RHSeeger wrote: post #201
jrace wrote: post #128

How much would you pay for: *Hearing test * Hearing aid fitting * Usage counselling * Follow up adjustments * Annual retest of your hearing * Replacement of lost hearing aids * Unlimited repair for 3 years ?? ====== I got out of the Audiology field in 2015. At that time all the above was included for every hearing aid we sold (Prices varied from $750 / ear - $3600 / ear. When I was in that field many companies tried…

> There is far more to fixing your hearing issues that just amplifying sound. Sadly, most people wait too long before trying a hearing aid, and give up because they hear too much noise. Of the people I know who have gotten hearing aids, every single one of them was disappointed. Every single one of them still had trouble hearing. As far as I can tell, the only thing the audiologists appear to be able to be able to co…

Perhaps it is because most of those people expected the hearing aid to work for them, and did not want to do any of the work they needed to do themselves.

Imagine not reading for 10 years because of bad eyesight, eye glasses do not make it so your brain can read, but instead makes it easier for your brain to see the symbols. your brain still needs to decode and comprehend them.

Our hearing system is far more complicated. You can look in the direction you want to see....but you hear all around you, even through walls.

You cannot stop hearing, even in your sleep. It is far more crucial to our environmental awareness than more people realize.

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#217

Post by dsizzle »

falcolas wrote: post #205
dsizzle wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why vision checks require a doctor at all. In the end, they're just relying on your responses anyway: "What's better: A or B"? In fact, I'd go further and say it doesn't even require another person. I, for one, am glad to see this bill.

FWIW, a checkup for me is 1 part refraction, one part retinal inspection, one part corneal inspection, and one part automated refraction/pressure checks. Only one of those parts can be done without a doctor or highly specialized equipment.

Right, I was only talking about that 1 part. (Wasn't suggesting there's no use for optometrists!)

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#218

Post by neffy »

RHSeeger wrote: post #204
EastOfTruth wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if, instead, the calibration process worked constantly? Give the user a button to press when they don't hear something well, and another when they do. On TVs, they call those buttons volume buttons, it is revolutionary.

A lot of the time it's not absolute volume. If you can't hear certain frequency ranges well, boosting the volume of all ranges is just going to drown out the ones you can't hear well.

Exactly - hearing is much more complicated than just noise sensitivity. For example, a somewhat underdiagnosed problems is issue with the frequency bins that the brain segments sound into for recognition deteriorating. Symptoms are - can hear just fine in a nice, uncluttered audio environment, say a test centre, but has issues if there is any significant background noise.

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#220

Post by RHSeeger »

JCM9 wrote: post #114
jjeaff wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been to maybe a half dozen different optometrists over the last 25 years and they have always used several expensive looking machines to screen for eye disease. Most frequently a machine that uses a puff of air to measure the pressure in your eye and more recently, a machine with a bright light that gets detailed imagery of the vascular structure on the back of your eye.

Yes, although that test is automated and typically done by a technician not an optometrist. You can train someone to use one of these machines in a few hours. If this was a key test no reason we couldn’t just put one in every GP office and have eye pressure checked during an annual checkup.

Those machines cost money and require some amount of training to use. Having them in an office that specializes in using them makes sense. Having your GP have every type of machine for every types of checkup (eyes, ears, CAT, MRI, etc... all things that _could_ be at the GP, but aren't) would not be cost efficient.
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