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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

#361

Post by encryptluks2 »

justinph wrote: post #309
themodelplumber wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kids of fraud are no joke. I'm pretty sure I'm a kid of fraud.

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

#362

Post by neither_color »

ericmcer wrote: post #199
KennyBlanken wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For eyeglasses, if someone wants to continue the same prescription they can't. What? You don't need a medical prescription to order glasses online. You can put in whatever numbers you want and they'll happily make them. You'd be an idiot to do so, however, as your vision can change with age.

You 100% need a prescription to order prescription glasses or contact lenses online. Expired prescriptions will be rejected as well.

Not if you order them from the UK ;-)

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

#363

Post by skellera »

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…

I was just thinking about this with the announcement of the new AirPods. Apple could really take the concert earplug market while getting great natural marketing (people wearing AirPods at concerts). Just balance and lower the volume for concerts.

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

#364

Post by kradeelav »

bane wrote: post #345
jrace wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THere may be now, but not 5 years ago. I have many ideas about how the industry can be improved, especially with the use of a smart phone app and user interactions. Not only is it plausible, but would make the clinicians (fitter) job easier and lead to far more hearing aid sales.

What's really needed is a decoupling of the hearing test from the calibration activity. A basic hearing test takes a few minutes in an isolated box with headphones (the 'ol click a button if you hear the tone test). From that profile it should be trivial to build out the profile of what frequencies to boost and what not to and program the aids there.

I appreciate the optimism (and do think there's some room for efficiency improvements!), but each step is a little more complicated than that. a true audiometric room/booth to do the testing (eg fully soundproof) in is very rarely found outside of audiologist offices or specialized academic spaces, for starters, and I do believe those are required for paperwork (whether it be insurance related part of the process to getting the right device fitted).

then there's also additional complications like types of hearing loss impacting calibration - some people react very negatively to higher (or lower) frequencies than others do, to the point facial stimulation can happen, and some people just have a frankly tricky profile that requires a trained audiologist on hand to work with them through several sessions, if not outright yearly on top of that, since the nerves and brain output can change by itself.

(source: have a cochlear implant, been doing the described experience since I was ~ 3yrs old.)

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

#365

Post by bradknowles »

jrace wrote: post #164
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess one question is: do those things have to cost thousands of dollars? What are the primary cost components? Are the people doing these jobs highly paid? Are they highly paid because of high costs of college tuition? Would free college help lower their costs?

My opinion: do those things have to cost thousands of dollars? --yes and no, costs could come down, but in the lifetime of a hearing aid it could be replaced 3 times or more at no charge to the user. What are the primary cost components? The primary components are: Microphone {cheap to produce} Receiver (speaker) {cheap to produce} Processing Chip {expensive to R&D, cheap to produce} Are the people doing these jobs h…

Maybe cheap to produce in larger sizes. As you have to make the components smaller and smaller to fit all the extra gubbins, each of those other components now become exponentially more expensive to design and produce.

Yes, there’s a lot of overcharging in this business, because the manufacturers charge what the market will bear, and because of insurance and lack of competition due to all the regulations they have to comply with, the market can bear a very high price.

But it’s still a very hard problem, and there’s a very significant component of user training over the long term that is required. When you were a newborn, you didn’t learn to hear and speak your native language in a single day, you didn’t learn to see and recognize faces and read written words in a single day. You shouldn’t expect a hearing aid to magically fix you in a single day — your brain needs time to retrain.

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

#366

Post by bradknowles »

dsr_ wrote: post #158
diob wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many cost barriers to treatments. It's definitely not for patients at this point. For instance, I am supposed to redo my sleep apnea test every so often. But it's out of pocket? Why bother, I know mine is due to my genetics (I'm not overweight). So why am I subjected to reproving my need for a prescription? For eyeglasses, if someone wants to continue the same prescription they can't. It's like healthcar…

That's particularly odd because the normal prescription for sleep apnea right now is for a self-adjusting PAP machine -- an APAP -- which has quite a range of pressures that it will automatically apply to minimize apneation events. And if you exceed the range, it will wake you up and alert you to that fact, too.

Not from my doctors. I asked.

They said that an auto-PAP is not the first choice. A CPAP is a better choice, if it will work for you at the pressures you need. But they only work up to certain levels of pressure.

An auto-PAP will work to higher levels of pressure, but then it has to continually adjust the levels of pressure that it applies based on the resistance it senses, and that is not as good for you as constant pressure.

And there’s no way a CPAP or auto-PAP is going to wake me up at night, short of causing me to go into an apnea condition and potentially die.

Thank you, but no. I’ll stick with my CPAP.

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

#367

Post by ddingus »

BurningFrog wrote: post #317
lisper wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why the US can’t follow the models followed most elsewhere in the world is unclear To the contrary, it is very clear: regulatory capture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Still unclear why Regulatory Capture only happens in the US?

We allow bribes.

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

#368

Post by bradknowles »

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.

My CPAP totally changed my life. I had no idea how horrible my sleep had been before.

I refuse to sleep a single night without it.

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

#369

Post by ineedasername »

This is part of an interesting trend in technological & human development. Massively expensive & highly specialized tech is being made common place & cheap more & more often, and perhaps more quickly.

So, yesterday's "treatments" for people with problems are becoming today's augmentations for otherwise healthy people.

--In years past, you might have a cardiologist prescribe the use of a constant heart monitor for a few days to track & diagnose issues. Now, you can get a cheap device that does that-- among other things-- for yourself. (Yes, the expensive specialized versions are still better)

--Glasses were for people with vision problems (or simple fashion) but now are in the early stages of AR, and (relatively) mainstream use for simple augmentations like music listening and personal assistants.

I'm sure I'm missing lots of other examples.

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

#370

Post by oneplane »

Wouldn't it make more sense if the FDA just wanted everyone to be able to hear properly? I get that they are a policy institution and "hear better, implement it however you like" isn't much of a policy, but an almost-directive (buy whatever you want) seems to be rather decoupled from any health related issue which is what an hearing aid is for.
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