A common assessment that my audiologist of 20 years has always given me regarding real ear measurement is that it’s likely to not provide much benefit for my level of hearing loss.
So, as I work on finding a new audiologist (today is appointment day for me. Whoo-hoo! Looking forward to potentially trialing Oticon devices…)…I wanted to ask this question:
For those with similar losses in either ear (or both): what do you think? Do you agree? Or disagree?
I have a severe hearing loss, my audiologist uses REM to ensure that my aids are working as designed, then the real adjustments are done. But i have issues with hearing that aren’t normal found. I have frequency dead spots and or frequency shifts. My audiologist and i worked with monthly appointments for a year and a half to find a fitting that works for me to understand speech. I an lucky that my hearing is stable and when i get newer aids all that is needed is to transform my old settings to the new aids and make needed changes to reflect the new technology.
Here’s the justification for REM from the 2021 book “Fitting and Dispensing Hearing Aids, Third Edition” by Taylor and Mueller. It doesn’t say that ensuring correct hearing aid output is less important if your hearing is worse.
Only you’ll know for sure, REM isn’t the holy grail, it certainly works for some but not everyone, either way you could still be in for further adjustments as cvkemp mentioned, it doesn’t matter on ones loss for the clinics to do REM, some would say it’s “best practise” and to avoid any that don’t!
This is brilliant. This - right here- fully explains why my last two Phonak hearing aids have always felt underpowered even though I wear UP models, and didn’t fully address what I was hearing. It has always felt like, for my last two hearing aids, excellent hearing was always just “out of reach” of what I was hearing and I couldn’t ever put my finger on it.
No wonder I have never been fully happy with Phonak’s hearing aids for the past two models.
This requires the same brand, same in-the-ear coupling (dome and/or mold type), and same fitting formula/rationale, yes?
I have worn Oticon aids now for over 13 years, i love the Oticon sound. I have tried other brands but stick with Oticon. But yes mostly, but my audiologist says as long as the same fitting formula is used he can go across platforms with some tweaking.
Yeah it’s easy enough to manually do this, just a little more time consuming, but that’s the thing, just stick to what you know best if it’s working.
