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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

#301

Post by treeman79 »

MandieD wrote: post #273
treeman79 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ordered an optometry kit from Amazon as my prescription changes by the hour most days. Was very interesting to play around and helped me isolate the 2 prescriptions that my eyes drift back and forth from. Something that eye doctors had given up on trying to help me.

OMG. You may end up having changed my life - it had never occurred to me that a) this was a thing I could just up and buy, and b) it really isn’t that expensive. No more worrying that I’m about to stick myself with the wrong prescription because the optician (yes, that’s who measures you for glasses in Germany) or I lost patience trying to find the boundary between spherical and cylindrical correction, or doing this…

I got a 200 dollar set that I’m happy with. It comes with “glasses” to attach the lenses to. But suggest ordering one that is more adjustable. The one it came with doesn’t adjust for distance between eyes.

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

#302

Post by mgkimsal »

EastOfTruth wrote: post #198
dmurray wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long thought the problem with hearing aids is the calibration process. People (often old, confused, and less tech-familiar) try them on and spend half an hour answering questions about "does that sound better?" 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. Let them have this for a month, let them try it…

> 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.

go further, and having 'hearing aids' that would let you rewind the last 5-10 seconds of a conversation to hear something again without asking people to repeat themselves...

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

#303

Post by tpmx »

coupdejarnac wrote: post #282
tpmx wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, at least you're doing it. Crude but realistic: There is a pretty high number of (often but not always overweight) undiagnosed/untreated people suffering from obstructive sleep apnea on the roads every day. They are causing a number of avoidable accidents every day. I think it's criminal to make CPAP as unaccessible as it is in the US.

Not to mention lost productivity. I wonder what the dollar amount for my lost productivity over my lifetime due to poor sleep would be. Probably very high.

Yeah, I probably lost a few years of productivity myself, before I got it diagnosed.

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

#304

Post by tdeck »

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…

This honestly doesn't sound very empathetic toward patients. Many of these people had fine hearing and then lost it. They've already "learned" how to hear and they reasonably expect the hearing aid to help restore it.

In your analogy, it would be like if my vision got worse and I got eyeglasses which partially restored it, but mirrored everything upside down with tons of static. Now I've got to learn to read upside down and tune out the static, but don't worry because I get 10 free lessons with a reading instructor. Oh and none of this was clearly explained to me or part of my expectation when buying glasses.

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

#305

Post by Swizec »

neffy wrote: post #218
RHSeeger wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Also a problem if you're not a native speaker. I am fluent in English and have been able to watch movies without subtitles for 20 years at least, probably more.

But put me in a noisy bar and my error correction suffers a lot. Suddenly it's hard to follow a conversation that in my native language would be effortless.

The worst situation is listening to a loud video on bad speakers. Doesn't matter how much you crank the volume, people are hard to understand because the brain's error correction isn't good enough. Use a good speaker and turn down the volume, suddenly it's perfect.

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

#306

Post by spaetzleesser »

It's always funny to see how the land of the "free" and free market" is not very "free market" when it comes to protecting the profits of favored industries like medical even from its own citizens.

Things like being required to go to a doctor and pay big $$$ to get a hearing aid or not being allowed to import drugs from countries where they are cheaper are absolutely not "free market".

Even during COVID the country could not deploy cheap rapid tests but only super expensive PCR tests.

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

#307

Post by ansgri »

mschuster91 wrote: post #269
gpt5 wrote: post #244

We are seeing a long term consolidation between hearing devices and headphones. On the headphones side, we are getting smaller, truly-wireless headphones with some ambient sound features (such as noise cancellation, and iOS hearing features). New trends like AR would just accelerate the change due to the need to solve all day worn audio devices. On the hearing aids side, almost every hearing aid today acts as an alwa…

> features such as protecting your ears against a sudden loud noise Reminds me of the Artemis Fowl series or the first Iron Man, awesome to see former science fiction coming closer to reality. Adaptive ear protection in real life would be really interesting on construction sites or for musicians...

These seem to exist for quite some time, like https://www.etymotic.com/product/gun-sport-pro/

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

#308

Post by nicoburns »

mikeInAlaska wrote: post #110
tristor wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger issue is that a prescription alone is not enough to order new glasses, you also need pupillary distance measurements in order to ensure the lenses are ground correctly. Many many optometrists will not provide these, only the legally obligated prescription. While for most people who have minimum prescriptions you can use a phone app or similar to get a rough PD, for anyone with serious prescriptions even mi…

My local optometrist uses a $99 Enshey (check amazon) IPD measurement device. I guess if I was ordering glasses for my entire family (we do), it would probably be worth it.

Really? Mine just eyeballed it with a ruler!

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

#309

Post by justinph »

themodelplumber wrote: post #264
gpt5 wrote: post #244

We are seeing a long term consolidation between hearing devices and headphones. On the headphones side, we are getting smaller, truly-wireless headphones with some ambient sound features (such as noise cancellation, and iOS hearing features). New trends like AR would just accelerate the change due to the need to solve all day worn audio devices. On the hearing aids side, almost every hearing aid today acts as an alwa…

Long live the consolidation. May it work out better than the consolidation between tuna cans and more expensive hearing aids. (I have a friend who's an audiologist...watch Starkey, they are very proactive about industry changes and headwinds.)

Starkey is not exactly a quality company and I would be more than happy to see them put out of business. They tried to shaft their employees out of retirement money, they inflated their donation numbers, and a former executive was sent to prison for all kids of fraud.

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

#310

Post by johncessna »

ansgri wrote: post #307
mschuster91 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> features such as protecting your ears against a sudden loud noise Reminds me of the Artemis Fowl series or the first Iron Man, awesome to see former science fiction coming closer to reality. Adaptive ear protection in real life would be really interesting on construction sites or for musicians...

These seem to exist for quite some time, like https://www.etymotic.com/product/gun-sport-pro/

I've got a product similar to these and they're great. You can have a normal conversation and it didn't take me long to realize their eavesdropping potential. My Surface headphones also have a feature that more or less acts as a hearing aid.
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