Definitely worth asking, but this can be an uphill battle. The first one I saw, I told her on the phone when I made the appointment “I can hear fine when it’s quiet, but can’t follow conversations in background noise. Can you help with that?” She said yes, so I made an appointment. She did the beep test and the word recognition test in a dead quiet booth. She then correctly observed that my mild loss shouldn’t be causing the problems I’m claiming to have, and that my speech recognition is fine in the quiet booth. I said “Yeah, that’s exactly what I told you on the phone.” She shrugged and said “I can’t help you.”
So I called up another one, told him everything that happened with the first one, and said I specifically wanted help with understanding speech in noise. He said he could help me, so I made an appointment with him. He redid the beep tests and the word recognition test (in the quiet booth) even though I’d given him a copy of the results from the first session, which weren’t even two months old. That didn’t thrill me, because I knew insurance wouldn’t pay for them twice in two months, but I figured he was just trying to be thorough. But then that was all he did! He, too, said he couldn’t help me. Got really mad when I wouldn’t pay him, too, but ultimately dropped it.
At that point, it was clear that randomly going through every name in the local yellow pages was going to be an expensive waste of time, so I started looking for audis who specialized in auditory processing disorders. I found one further away who does remote testing/fitting, but that would have been around $10,000 for testing + aids. I knew all of that would be out of pocket. I’d have paid it if it came down to it, because this was affecting my career trajectory and I was running out of options. But first, I decided to roll the dice on ebay and self-programming. It’s not for everyone, but it’s worked out incredibly well for me.
I know a lot of audis don’t like the fact that people do this. But in many cases, we tried to do it the “right” way first, then resorted to this because the same people complaining about it made it impossible for us to do things any other way.