LONGVIEW, WASHINGTON
360-423-3608
Allied Hearing Aid Specialists Blog
Monday, May 23, 2022
As it turns out, blogging is more difficult than it looks. A good blog is done at least once per week yet here I am writing nearly four years after my last entry. Those of you who closely follow my blog have had a good respite while those who have never read it look at the dates and wonder if I’m even still around. I considered expunging the blog page off my site but found it’s easier to just write an entry because removing the blog looks like a lot of work. So, post-Covid we are now down to one person in the office, Randy Parr. We’ve updated the front of our building, but aren’t finished yet. If you happen to read this blog, please send me a note on the “Talk to the Experts” page, and maybe I’ll write more often.Friday, August 03, 2018
Okay, file this in the “Things I Should Have Known, But Didn’t” folder. For years people in my industry have told me never to use those little sticks with cotton on either end for cleaning your ears. They can push wax further into your ear canal and leave cotton fibers behind that can then accumulate and then gather more wax until you have a big problem. Nevertheless, knowing that still didn’t deter me from using cotton swabs for cleaning wax out of my own ears. However, yesterday I read an article by Max Stanley Chartrand called “But What’s Wrong With Q-Tips?” In that article he spoke about something in our ear canals called the keratin layer which, as it turns out, is very important to the health of our ears. This keratin layer automatically removes debris from our ears, including ear wax, although it is a bit slow doing so, up to three months. Cotton swabs remove the keratin layer which is actually a pretty bad thing to do. The keratin layer manages pH in our ear canal and protects against fungus and bacteria. The removal of it makes the ear susceptible to bleeding and can mess up your ear drum and other bad stuff. So, how do you clean your ears? Chartrand’s answer is, “You don’t—the ears are self-cleaning if you allow natural processes to do their work.” The bottom line seems to be that by cleaning your ears with a cotton swab or match stick or bobby pin or anything else, you may actually, over time, achieve the opposite result than what you intended. Who knew? Well I guess I shoulda, but I didn’t, but I do now, and now you do, too. https://www.audiologyonline.com/articles/but-what-s-wrong-with-1138Friday, June 8, 2018
Allied Hearing Aid Specialists was named in 1990. I wanted to have a name that started with an A in order to be among the first in the telephone book. Even though we were just starting out, I wanted to sound big. Allied sounded big because of Allied Moving and Storage and other large companies with that name. I couldn’t answer who or what we were allied with, but it did start with an A and did sound big so I went with it. I also wanted the name to describe exactly what we do because ambiguous business names have always annoyed me therefore the words Hearing Aid had to be in the name. Then the last word, Specialists, of course, had to be plural in keeping with the sounding big theme. Our industry has never been real specific as to what we should call ourselves: hearing aid dealer, hearing aid fitter, hearing aid dispenser, but Hearing Aid Specialist sounded important and when you’re 33-years old you alway want to think of yourself as important, at least you want other people to think you are. So there it was, Allied Hearing Aid Specialists, kind of a long name, 30 characters if you count the spaces and it’s hard to fit on a sign or a rubber stamp, but I liked it. In the state of Washington, the Department of Health has always licensed us as “Hearing Aid Fitter/Dispenser”. However, two years ago they changed our licensing designation to “Hearing Aid Specialist”, the very name our company has used for over 28 years. What does it all mean? Was I so forward thinking that it took the government 26 years to catch up? You tell me.Tuesday, April 17, 2018
From time to time people ask me or my associates how I, being a 30+ year hearing aid specialist and having access to the latest hearing aid technology, still have difficulty hearing them. They ask how could they trust me with their hearing if I can’t even fit my own hearing well enough to hear them without asking them to repeat. Some have even taken that reasoning so far as to go elsewhere to get their hearing aids. While the question may seem logical, the answer is, as answers usually are, more complicated than “good hearing aids equals good hearing”. Our hearing is a magnificent and complex organ that converts mechanical vibrations (sound) into signals that the brain can use. When someone has hearing loss the problem could be conductive (the vibration catcher), sensori-neural (the vibration converter), central (the brain), or a combination. Someone having normal hearing might suppose that hearing loss is just a reduction of volume and replacing that lost volume with hearing aids fixes the problem. And, depending on the type and severity of the hearing loss, sometimes that’s true. However, more often, while hearing aids make the hearing much better, they don’t completely solve the problem. Yes, usually better hearing aids equal better hearing but that isn’t the same as better hearing aids equal perfect hearing. That brings us back to my hearing. My hearing aids are top of the line and enable me to hear about as well as I am able to hear. A number of manufacturer representatives can verify that they have tried to improve my results by using their brand of top end hearing aids but failed. It is like trying to make someone who is nearly blind see 20/20 with stronger glasses, there is only so much you can do. So, before you go somewhere else for your hearing aids, ask yourself the question: who should you really trust your hearing to, someone who has book and anecdotal knowledge about hearing loss OR someone with more than 30 years experience fitting hearing aids and who also shares the same hearing challenges that you have? ~RandyThursday, March 22, 2018
I wrote a couple of articles on ezinearticles.com. One of them is a tongue-in-cheek article called How To Fake Your Way Through Hearing Loss Without Looking Like An Idiot. And the other is a little more serious called Musical Tinnitus and Me. If you’re interested in such things, just click on the title and it will open a link to it.
Longview, WA
Allied Hearing Aid
Specialists Blog
Monday, May 23, 2022
As it turns out, blogging is more difficult than it looks. A good blog is done at least once per week yet here I am writing nearly four years after my last entry. Those of you who closely follow my blog have had a good respite while those who have never read it look at the dates and wonder if I’m even still around. I considered expunging the blog page off my site but found it’s easier to just write an entry because removing the blog looks like a lot of work. So, post-Covid we are now down to one person in the office, Randy Parr. We’ve updated the front of our building, but aren’t finished yet. If you happen to read this blog, please send me a note on the “Talk to the Experts” page, and maybe I’ll write more often.Friday, August 03, 2018
Okay, file this in the “Things I Should Have Known, But Didn’t” folder. For years people in my industry have told me never to use those little sticks with cotton on either end for cleaning your ears. They can push wax further into your ear canal and leave cotton fibers behind that can then accumulate and then gather more wax until you have a big problem. Nevertheless, knowing that still didn’t deter me from using cotton swabs for cleaning wax out of my own ears. However, yesterday I read an article by Max Stanley Chartrand called “But What’s Wrong With Q-Tips?” In that article he spoke about something in our ear canals called the keratin layer which, as it turns out, is very important to the health of our ears. This keratin layer automatically removes debris from our ears, including ear wax, although it is a bit slow doing so, up to three months. Cotton swabs remove the keratin layer which is actually a pretty bad thing to do. The keratin layer manages pH in our ear canal and protects against fungus and bacteria. The removal of it makes the ear susceptible to bleeding and can mess up your ear drum and other bad stuff. So, how do you clean your ears? Chartrand’s answer is, “You don’t—the ears are self-cleaning if you allow natural processes to do their work.” The bottom line seems to be that by cleaning your ears with a cotton swab or match stick or bobby pin or anything else, you may actually, over time, achieve the opposite result than what you intended. Who knew? Well I guess I shoulda, but I didn’t, but I do now, and now you do, too. https://www.audiologyonline.com/articles/but-what-s- wrong-with-1138Friday, June 8, 2018
Allied Hearing Aid Specialists was named in 1990. I wanted to have a name that started with an A in order to be among the first in the telephone book. Even though we were just starting out, I wanted to sound big. Allied sounded big because of Allied Moving and Storage and other large companies with that name. I couldn’t answer who or what we were allied with, but it did start with an A and did sound big so I went with it. I also wanted the name to describe exactly what we do because ambiguous business names have always annoyed me therefore the words Hearing Aid had to be in the name. Then the last word, Specialists, of course, had to be plural in keeping with the sounding big theme. Our industry has never been real specific as to what we should call ourselves: hearing aid dealer, hearing aid fitter, hearing aid dispenser, but Hearing Aid Specialist sounded important and when you’re 33- years old you alway want to think of yourself as important, at least you want other people to think you are. So there it was, Allied Hearing Aid Specialists, kind of a long name, 30 characters if you count the spaces and it’s hard to fit on a sign or a rubber stamp, but I liked it. In the state of Washington, the Department of Health has always licensed us as “Hearing Aid Fitter/Dispenser”. However, two years ago they changed our licensing designation to “Hearing Aid Specialist”, the very name our company has used for over 28 years. What does it all mean? Was I so forward thinking that it took the government 26 years to catch up? You tell me.Tuesday, April 17, 2018
From time to time people ask me or my associates how I, being a 30+ year hearing aid specialist and having access to the latest hearing aid technology, still have difficulty hearing them. They ask how could they trust me with their hearing if I can’t even fit my own hearing well enough to hear them without asking them to repeat. Some have even taken that reasoning so far as to go elsewhere to get their hearing aids. While the question may seem logical, the answer is, as answers usually are, more complicated than “good hearing aids equals good hearing”. Our hearing is a magnificent and complex organ that converts mechanical vibrations (sound) into signals that the brain can use. When someone has hearing loss the problem could be conductive (the vibration catcher), sensori-neural (the vibration converter), central (the brain), or a combination. Someone having normal hearing might suppose that hearing loss is just a reduction of volume and replacing that lost volume with hearing aids fixes the problem. And, depending on the type and severity of the hearing loss, sometimes that’s true. However, more often, while hearing aids make the hearing much better, they don’t completely solve the problem. Yes, usually better hearing aids equal better hearing but that isn’t the same as better hearing aids equal perfect hearing. That brings us back to my hearing. My hearing aids are top of the line and enable me to hear about as well as I am able to hear. A number of manufacturer representatives can verify that they have tried to improve my results by using their brand of top end hearing aids but failed. It is like trying to make someone who is nearly blind see 20/20 with stronger glasses, there is only so much you can do. So, before you go somewhere else for your hearing aids, ask yourself the question: who should you really trust your hearing to, someone who has book and anecdotal knowledge about hearing loss OR someone with more than 30 years experience fitting hearing aids and who also shares the same hearing challenges that you have? ~RandyThursday, March 22, 2018
I wrote a couple of articles on ezinearticles.com. One of them is a tongue-in-cheek article called How To Fake Your Way Through Hearing Loss Without Looking Like An Idiot. And the other is a little more serious called Musical Tinnitus and Me. If you’re interested in such things, just click on the title and it will open a link to it.
