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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

#251

Post by jtwaleson »

0des wrote: post #212
jtwaleson wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm CTO of easee, an online eye exam and have been involved in some US market research. It's a rapidly developing field and a lot of regulations are a gray area or different per state. E.g. it might be mandatory to have a valid prescription, but it might not be mandatory for the seller to verify this before selling glasses online.

I've just learned some new things about the eyeglass rule from a sibling in this thread.

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

#252

Post by jrace »

phkahler wrote: post #234
EastOfTruth wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so a smart volume button

That pays attention to the environment and changes the volume (part of the spectrum perhaps?) that is what you're likely to be listening to. This is of course a huge oversimplification, and aiming for it is probably what the industry is doing.

That is exactly what the tech does, automatically adjusts based on the amount of noise and speech in the environment. And going a step further, applying directional microphone control to better pick up sounds where the speech is.

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

#253

Post by brutus1213 »

jrace wrote: post #156
scottlamb wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Buy a hearing aid today from any major provider in Canada and you get: [...] Do you know what the status quo in the US is? (I don't, other than the prescription requirement from the article.) What you describe for Canada sounds pretty good to me, but I wouldn't assume any part of US healthcare is as inexpensive as Canadian healthcare or that the regulations are as well thought out.

No idea, but an initial search at "Connect Hearing US" (which also has a large Canadian arm states; "2-week FREE hearing aid trial* Try before you buy, absolutely free! Take a new pair of hearing aids home for two weeks to see how they work in everyday situations — no money down and no obligation. 3 years FREE Batteries Get three years of batteries included with your purchase no matter what hearing aids you buy. Each…

It is not perfect in Canada. Getting aids for our child and was shocked that this is a few grand out of pocket (after gold standard work insurance, provincial aid, etc). The province pays 500 bucks per hearing aid, which seems ridiculous given the costs. We are well to do so it doesn't matter but I am shocked that this isn't fully covered given the taxes I pay (in tech .. so you can guess). For kids, this should be fully paid by the government - no questions asked. As a few others (who seem to be knowledgeable) have posted .. if u miss out on hearing, you start to be less productive member of society. Being in a western, rich society where we pay for stupid shit all the time out of taxes, the govt not fully paying for some basic model of hearing aids seems like a crime (basically, not enough people are impacted, so politicians don't care). I'm glad the US is improving the situation here for its populace.

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

#254

Post by falcolas »

dsizzle wrote: post #217
falcolas wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

I guess I'm a bit confused then - if it's part and parcel of a regular checkup, what's the value of breaking the refraction out into a wholly separate activity?

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

#255

Post by jsmith45 »

nostromo wrote: post #83
bckygldstn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the commenters asking: this applies to contact lenses, not eye glasses. From the Contact Lens Rule [1]: "a contact lens seller cannot provide contact lenses to its customer unless the seller either obtains a copy of the prescription or verifies the prescription information with the prescriber" The Eyeglass Rule [2] doesn't contain this stipulation. https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/rules/rulemaking-regulatory-... h…

Many states have that rule though. In California, for example, you can't buy prescription glasses without an active prescription. I found this out when my glasses broke on the weekend and couldn't get replacements before talking to a doctor -- none of which had availability for several days. So I suffered from headaches and poor vision for several days thanks to this ridiculous regulation.

Sure states may have that rule, but it is totally legal to go to a state that does not have the rule, buy some glasses and bring them back. (Or to buy online from a state that does not have the rule).

Neither the FDA nor FTC at the federal level technically require prescriptions for glasses. Indeed, most online glasses shops will simply take you at your word that you have a prescription, presumably because they are located in a state that nominally requires a prescription, but places no requirement on the shops to verify that the customer really does have one.

This is totally different from contacts, where at the federal level, sellers must verify the prescription with the prescriber, except that if 8 business hours have passed since they started trying to contact the prescriber, without hearing back, the prescription is considered verified. (That last is to prevent the prescriber from trying to prevent customer from getting lenses elsewhere by refusing to verify).

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

#256

Post by tpmx »

LocalH wrote: post #109
throwawaysea wrote: post #24

Middlemen and gatekeepers are all over our medical industry. When I travel I am always surprised at how much easier it is to get drugs outside the US. Many prescription drugs here are over the counter elsewhere and much cheaper. I hope we start removing prescription gatekeeping more broadly, so I can stop paying hundreds for performative office visits that offer no value. It’s also a big time sink just to get some mu…

Capitalism (as a life goal , rather than one of many tools in a toolkit) is what makes all that possible. If can insert yourself in the middle of a transaction, and do that long enough, then you can get pretty entrenched to the point where people just expect it to be that way. I maintain that, if automobiles were invented today , the horse-and-buggy industry would be able to successfully fend them off, based on the p…

There's plenty of capitalism happening in the countries where these things are readily available.

Cronyism is the word should have been looking for.

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

#257

Post by the__alchemist »

Vecr wrote: post #60
the__alchemist wrote: post #11

Great news. I've been learning about and implementing real-time DSP algorithms for audio enhancement. (Cortex-M7) I started this hoping to make scifi headphone that enhance hearing for normal people with different presets, but realized what I'm essentially building is more like a hearing aid. Didn't even realize the regularly issue. (Although using the article's terminology, could probably already market this as a PS…

I'm pretty sure That's what 3M Peltor Comtac headsets do, they have microphones on the outside and speakers on the inside, without passing through gunshots or explosions, so you can maintain situational awareness in a combat situation.

Sounds badass!

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

#258

Post by the__alchemist »

ygjb wrote: post #41
the__alchemist wrote: post #11

Great news. I've been learning about and implementing real-time DSP algorithms for audio enhancement. (Cortex-M7) I started this hoping to make scifi headphone that enhance hearing for normal people with different presets, but realized what I'm essentially building is more like a hearing aid. Didn't even realize the regularly issue. (Although using the article's terminology, could probably already market this as a PS…

Check out nuraphones; I don't know enough about hearing and audio to know what voodoo they are doing, but as a person with significant hearing loss, the hearing customization they perform during set up allows the device to emit the right frequencies at the right volume that I can hear a significant portion of the left audio channel (which is impressive, given that I am "profoundly deaf" in that ear).

Awesome. Looks outstanding from their site. Seems to be marketed at music listening, especially in noisy environments, although I can't tell for sure.

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

#259

Post by chrisfinazzo »

jrace wrote: post #209
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.

Hearing aids have volume controls, which some clinicians disable for new users - as it causes more problems than it fixes. And just like the TV remote they increase all sounds - good (speech) and bad (music and explosions). The issue is not just "is it loud enough" but rather, "can you understand what you want to hear when you want to hear it?" imagine yourself at a busy restaurant. you want to hear your spouses spea…

Reminds me of the race to the bottom we're also seeing in orthodontics.

Whether like me, you never got the hang of a retainer after braces - or went off braces too soon, in my case - there has been a number of companies trying to get costs down and make the process less expensive and onerous.

Yet, talking to my regular dentist, who has used Invisalign with patients before, it's not the fact that there are more competitors in the field, essentially putting pressure on the DMD's and others to up their game, it's that after the initial consult, the entire process is (largely) unsupervised.

If you don't fit (or tune) something like this properly, it doesn't work.

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

#260

Post by RHSeeger »

jrace wrote: post #216
RHSeeger wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 complica…

> 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.

Or, alternatively, it's exactly what I said and the device + audiologist combination just isn't up to correcting a lot of common hearing issues. That seems far more likely than the vast majority of people doing everything wrong.

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