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Comment by jrace | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

A better analogy is what if your vision loss was not only clarity, but also brightness?

And once you put on your glasses everything is brighter.

You need to adjust to the change, and then slowley adapt.

Now what if putting on the glasses meant you saw far more on your peripheral vision?

This too would be a big change and a barrier to getting better.

I got high quality progressive eyeglasses some years ago. Hated it at first. It was like swimming in a fish bowl. If you don't position your head correctly things are blurry. Now it's completely natural and I love them. I had to learn.

Hearing aids are the exact same. It's slightly unnatural but once you learn how to use the tool, it's a super power. I can hear conversations in crowded bars when normal people can't. Loud noises compress in a pleasant fashion. I just have to get used to some occasional spatial distortion and subtle flanging

The thing is, though, that it appears to be very different depending on the person. And there seems to be a LOT of cases where the technology just isn't up to the task. Sure, we _can_ blame the user in every case, but if the cases are highly skewed to the users have a poor experience / not hearing well with them, then really it makes more sense to blame the technology until you have proof otherwise.

> 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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