Better Together: Make Hearing Health a Family Affair

If you’re like most Americans, it was likely elementary or middle school, which means as an adult, you’re overdue. Going home for the holidays may be a perfect time to drive your parents to a hearing center to get their hearing tested, but you might consider being the first one in the testing booth. The test is easy, painless, and if you’re near a Sam’s Club, you can get tested for free – and get hearing aids – in the same day. Lucid Hearing has hearing centers in more than 500 Sam’s Club locations nationwide. Finding one near you (or near your parents’ home) is just as easy as the hearing test itself.

Beyond finding out if you need hearing support, taking your parent or parents with you to get tested is a big win if you suspect they have hearing loss. Present yourself as the example of how easy it is to get tested and use the opportunity to stress the importance of getting hearing aids if needed. If you take the lead, they’re more likely to step into the hearing booth after you. From start to finish, testing can be done in under an hour.

To make this family journey to hearing health even easier, recently the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids. These hearing devices are for those with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss, and they can be purchased without a hearing test and without a prescription. The FDA’s intent is to make hearing aids more accessible and more affordable to the millions of Americans who need hearing support. Stoltz says OTC hearing aids are a wonderful opportunity for people to get help sooner, and therefore aid in the preservation of speech understanding.

“The longer people wait to get help, the longer and sometimes harder, the transition is to using hearing aids,” Stoltz notes. “The same is true for speech understanding. The longer you wait to get help, it becomes unlikely that you’ll regain some of the speech understanding that has been lost due to hearing loss.” Learn more about loss of speech understanding and its correlation to hearing loss.

Stoltz also emphasizes that while OTC hearing aids can be purchased without first going through a hearing test, she highly recommends getting tested anyway.

“Getting tested is easy, and it’s the best way to accurately determine your level of hearing loss. Not everyone is a candidate for OTC. If your hearing loss falls into a more severe range, it’s best for you to get prescription hearing aids,” Stoltz says. “It’s really important to get what is going to work best for you and help you hear with clarity. If you buy OTC hearing aids, but you actually need prescription aids, then you’ll get frustrated and perhaps just end up thinking that the hearing aids don’t work, or worse, that nothing will work for you.” Learn more about the difference between OTC hearing aids versus prescription. Lucid Hearing offers OTC and prescription hearing aids online, in Sam’s Club locations, and in other retail stores across the country.