What Should You Ask During Your Hearing Aid Fitting?

Attending your very first hearing aid appointment can be daunting. It’s one of the most important steps to helping you restore your hearing and it’s a meeting that you can’t take lightly. In order to help you get the best care possible, we’ve put together three important questions that you should ask your audiologist when you arrive at your fitting.

How often should I be using my hearing aids?

Some people assume that you should wear them all the time, but your first experience with hearing aids will typically be strange and feel “off.” This is because the brain needs to adjust to your new hearing ability, and it can be especially weird if you’ve been experiencing hearing loss for a long time but have only recently decided to get a pair of hearing aids.

You should typically be using your hearing aids for a couple of hours every day in order to adjust to them. However, your audiologist might give you a schedule on when to use them or situations where you should be using them depending on your lifestyle.

How do I keep my hearing aids clean?

Although hearing aids are built to be quite sturdy small devices, you’re going to be depend on them day to day, so it’s crucial to take good care of them. You should ask your audiologist how to properly clean your hearing aids. Most audiologists will suggest giving them a little wipe whenever you’ve finished using them to prevent the buildup of sweat, grime and earwax.

Tips will vary between audiologists, so follow their instructions on how to clean your hearing aids if you want to prevent from them failing in the near future. Remember to keep them stored safely and try your best not to lose them because they could suffer damage and you may be asked to pay in order to repair them.

What do I do if they stop working?

There are often a couple of simple troubleshooting steps that range from switching the batteries out to cleaning them to ensure there is no blockage in the speaker or microphone parts of the hearing aid. These will depend on the hearing aids you have, so ask your audiologist what to do in the event they stop working.

It could be something as simple as turning them on and off, or there could be settings that you may have accidentally changed. You’ll likely receive an instruction manual, but it’s good to take a few notes so if something does happen and they stop working, you can easily fix the issue and get a working pair of hearing aids again. If that fails, then you’ll likely need to bring them in for repairs or maintenance in the future.