Have you noticed your aging parents are starting to have trouble hearing? It can be a touchy subject, and no one wants to “nag,” but at the same time, hearing issues can have a profound impact on their health and quality of life, so ignoring it doesn’t seem like a good option either. What should you do? Dr. Sara Hanley, Au.D. shares her advice on having these difficult conversations. Watch more Q&As, then schedule your appointment with us at either our Bloomington or Pontiac locations.
I’m Dr. Sara Hanley at Bloomington-Normal Audiology, and welcome to I Hear You, where the audiologists at BNA answer your hearing-related questions. Kenneth in Bloomington asks, “What are some tips and recommendations for talking to my reluctant aging parents about getting their hearing checked?” Kenneth, that’s a great question. Now normally when I have a patient who is asking me about a family member, and wanting to get them in but the family member doesn’t want to come in, I stress that it’s just a hearing test. Coming in for a hearing test is really pretty easy. It’s painless, so that’s an added bonus, and it’s pretty quick. It’s gonna take 20-30 minutes to do the testing, and then you’ll have the results immediately after. So it’s really an informational session, is what I try to stress. It never hurts just to get a baseline of where your hearing is at that moment. Once you find out, you know. And then we can monitor if there are any changes in your hearing down the road, we’ll be able to have that documented. The other thing to consider is coming in for the hearing test doesn’t mean you’re gonna leave with hearing aids that day. It doesn’t even mean necessarily that you need hearing aids. But if you do, then we can talk as much or as little as you’d like about hearing aid information. In fact, we do have patients who come in occasionally just for the hearing test. Just to find out where their hearing is, and there are some patients who don’t need hearing devices at that exact time. We’re starting to see that more and more, actually, because really we recommend probably at age 50 to start coming in for just a baseline. So we are seeing more patients coming in earlier, just to get an idea of where their hearing is, and then we have a system where we can call them or touch base with them in a few years just to check in on if they’d like to get back in to test it again and see if there’ve been any changes. So, we recommend if you’re gonna get into that dangerous territory of talking about hearing with your parents, it may be easier just to talk to them about coming in for a hearing test and not get into too much information about “you need hearing aids” or that conversation yet. Just say, “Hey, why don’t you go get a hearing test, see where your hearing is.” And then once you’re here, we can talk to them a little more about what type of devices they may need, if any. Hope that helped! If you have more questions, let us know. I’m Dr. Sara Hanley from Bloomington-Normal Audiology, and we’re ‘hear’ for you.