Category: Uncategorized

#1- Wear them all day, every day. It is tempting to leave your hearing aids on the dresser when you’re home alone or will be in a quiet environment for hours. But think about that for a minute. Your ears are always ‘on’ even in the most peaceful times. Because an area is quiet does not mean it is completely …

Hearing aids aren’t very fun at the best of times. When they constantly stop up with earwax they can be downright maddening! Take heart, this is a universal frustration and, for the most part, can’t be helped. Your ear produces wax as both a skin conditioner and as a defensive mechanism to prevent the intrusion (or expedite the removal) of …

Earwax (or, more properly, cerumen) is really cool stuff! It is a bug repellent, dust catcher and skin conditioner; it also has both anti-fungal and anti-bacterial properties. A little earwax is a good thing! Most people don’t like the wet feeling they have after a shower and will use a cotton swab to dry out the canal. An effective solution …

A patient came in last week with tremendous pain in his right ear. He was cleaning his ears with a cotton swab and succeeded only in firmly packing the earwax further in his ear. In an effort to remove the wax, he used an over-the-counter wax softener that made the impacted wax swell and put additional pressure in his eardrum. …

If you are a true audiophile or a budding professional musician, passive hearing protection may not be the best answer. The world of electronic music monitors has exploded in the last few years and there are now more options than ever. The noise isolation and canceling properties of the latest products have become so sophisticated that they are as solidly …

In a noisy, crowded room, your brain can pick up subtle parts of speech and automatically arrange them into useful thoughts. Ever wondered how this miraculous feat happens? Well, new research brings us closer to understanding just that. Researchers at Trinity College in Dublin were able to pinpoint the regions of the brain responsible for processing each individual sound that …

One of the most common complaints I hear is how hard it can be to understand the television. One of the biggest frustrations is the lack of volume consistency from one program to the next or even between channels. (Don’t even get me started on the commercials!). There are many products in the market that are designed to make it …

Did you know that cell phones have hearing aid compatibility ratings? The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) requires that cell phone makers and service providers produce phones that have less static, less interference, and better telecoil connections. If you need a hearing aid compatible cell phone, just look at the label. All cell phones will have an ‘M’ rating (M1 thru …

With increases in the prevalence of technology over the past decade, our lives have never been busier and more full of distractions—and we’ve never been more at risk for hearing loss than we are now. Noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) used to be considered a problem that only the elderly faced, but over the prior three decades, hearing loss increases have …

During the month of October, Vibrant Hearing is hosting a toiletry drive to support the mission of the Povarello Center. Please drop off toiletry donations to the Missoula Vibrant Hearing office. The Povarello provides for the immediate needs of 300-350 Missoulians per day. Some of those needs are more basic than you might guess. Please consider a monetary or toiletry donation, …