Why You Should Take a Relative to Your Audiology Appointment

At Soundwave Hearing Care, we offer audiologist services and hearing aids to everyone in the Calgary community.

When it comes to protecting your hearing, researchers are discovering that there's a lot more that goes into it than simply buying the right technology for your condition. For example, we believe that not enough attention is paid to the emotional toll that losing one's hearing can take.

Your hearing is a huge part of your life and how you engage with the world. It isn't just how you gain some kinds of information about the world. You also engage with other people on an emotional level through sound. What people say is important, but how they say it is important too. Picking up on subtle emotional inflections people give their voices as they speak is also an essential way we communicate and understand one another.

It's unfortunate but often true that the loss of one's hearing can also mean a loss of a whole emotional dimension of one's life when one is no longer able to read emotional cues conveyed through people's voices. Studies show that those who are losing their hearing are more likely to develop depression than others. For these reasons, we believe that we can do more than simply provide appropriate and well-fit hearing aids to the clients that come to our Calgary clinic. We want to get your involved in taking control of your own medical care.

How can I take control of my medical care?

The next time you visit your audiologist at our clinic in Calgary, we recommend that you bring a family member along with you. This will achieve several things that will be a great help to your audiologist consultation as well as your process of coping with hearing loss:

• Moral support and family involvement

  Perhaps most obviously, when you visit our Calgary clinic with a family member, you'll have moral support in a potentially emotionally stressful situation. More generally, hearing loss is both a biological problem and a social problem for those losing their hearing. Your family is a huge part of your social life and support system. The more they're actively involved in helping find solutions to new social problems, the easier those solutions will be to practice and implement.

  
  

• Develop more complete coping strategies

  Your audiologist can help by providing you with a hearing device but you'll still have to develop social strategies to support for your new way of hearing. No one knows you better than your family, so they'll be a great help in developing concrete ways in which you can manage your social life to gradually become more comfortable with your new way of hearing and interacting with others.

  
  

If you're in need of an audiologist or a hearing aid in the Calgary area, contact us at Soundwave Hearing Care today.