Q: I’m still working, and I feel that wearing a hearing aid will impact on my ability to do my job, particularly with the attitude others have toward hearing aids. Can you do something about this?
A: I was watching a re-run of an episode of Seinfeld, a show I stopped watching a long time ago, but this one caught my attention again, for the same reason it did when I first saw it several years ago. The guest star was Rob Schneider, generally a pretty funny guy, although that is arguable, and his character was a new employee at the J. Peterman company, where the character of Elaine was employed. Bob, Rob Schneider’s character, was hard of hearing, from the contents of the episode; I would judge that he would have been severely hard of hearing, perhaps even profoundly. The gist of this back story is that Elaine feels Bob is faking his hearing loss and wants to try to prove it. Schneider really hammed up the character, to the point where it was, as you would expect, comical. Constantly fiddling with his hearing aid, never getting any sonic cues, even to the point where it seemed he ignored visual cues. But Bob was a bit of a buffoon, and it is this depiction that bothered me, (no reflection on Schneider’s acting skills). It’s the stereotype, and that episode probably did more damage to people with hearing loss than anything the general public could ever do.
I have said before that I am a statistics guy. I love reading them and the interpretations of those statistics and bringing them to light in forums like this one. That being said, I recently read an article published by the Better Hearing Institute titled: “Want a Better Salary? Get a Hearing Aid!”. Of course, it applied to people with hearing loss, but it used data extrapolated from the continuing study by Dr. Sergei Kochkin called MarkeTrac. This study is republished and updated every four years, they are currently in their 25th year, and tracks the efficacy, sales, proliferation and differentiation of the hearing aid marketplace. They sample people from all over the world, but with a major focus on North America, and specifically the US, which is the largest market outside of Asia. They cover all kinds of topics from which hearing loss is most prevalent, to how much of an effect wearing them has on peoples’ lives. One particular article focused on the work environment. There were several outcomes, but the one I wanted to point out is this: In the average North American workplace, close to 12% of the employees would have some form of hearing loss. Of that 12%, a little more than one third of them wore hearing aids while the other 66% did not. In general, those who wore hearing aids had higher household incomes. Even more interesting is the fact that as the degree of hearing loss got worse, the bigger the divide between those who wore hearing aids and those who don’t. “The model demonstrates that income drops as a function of hearing loss, but more sharply for people with severe hearing losses.”, (Kochkin, 2010). Kochkin went on to talk about how allowing a federal funding model in the US could very well generate more revenue for the government. The idea being that if they pay for hearing aids every 5 years and people earn, for example, $11,000 more per year, (the average difference between people with aided severe hearing losses and unaided severe hearing losses), the government could recoup their investment inside of a few years and have some of that revenue left over. Even if they allowed for an income tax deduction for the full value, they would still be further ahead.
There are hundreds of reasons to treat a hearing loss, even a mild one. This is one of them and one that might strike a cord with some people who have been putting of the decision because of what other people might think, particularly at your workplace. Take the Seinfeld episode for the comedic value it had, but not for the unrealistic depiction of a person wearing hearing aids. You probably won’t know they’re wearing them anyway!