![]() Generally, hard of hearing adults did not follow the lead of these children and begin wearing binaural body hearing aids. Parents and clinicians made their judgments on the basis of careful behavioral observations and the desire – rightly in my estimation – to give the children the benefit of any doubt. Because these children usually exhibited severe language delays, it was not feasible to conduct objective studies to evaluate the presumed listening superiority of binaural hearing. (Indeed, the fabrication of these harnesses became a quite a cottage industry among some of the parents.) This practice was followed in spite of the fact that there was little objective evidence attesting to the superiority of binaural versus monaural amplification. Soon, it became quite common to see young children wearing frontal harnesses with two pockets, into which body hearing aids were inserted. Besides, they could see that everybody else had two ears and they couldn’t quite see the logic of amplifying just one ear for their children. They reasoned that if one aid helped, two could possibly help even more. Many parents, in particular, were not satisfied with fitting just one hearing aid to the children. In addition to the expansion and development of other educational option (day programs, parent-infant programs, mainstreaming, etc.), their presence inspired a rethinking of the way hearing aids were fit. In the middle l960s, as a consequence of a Maternal Rubella epidemic, audiology centers were suddenly inundated with a large number of congenitally hearing-impaired children, all of whom required careful evaluations and appropriate management measures. (Generally, the decision was to amplify the poorer ear, provided the unaided ear could make a significant hearing contribution on its own, or the better ear when the poorer ear was just too impaired.) The norm at the time was to amplify just one ear, with the determination of which ear to amplify emerging as a major clinical question. This same reasoning prevailed during the era of the smaller body-worn hearing aids. These were big and bulky instruments and wearing one was just about all a person could easily tolerate. With the first few generations of electronic hearing aids, there was no choice but to amplify just one ear. Before reviewing and commenting on this article, it may be helpful to first put the issue into a broader historical perspective. ![]() Are binaural hearing aids better? An interesting and provocative article in the September 2005 issue of Journal of the American Academy of Audiology (JAAA) by several respected researchers (Therese and Brian Walden) has reopened this question, one that I thought had long been settled in favor of binaural relative to monaural hearing aids. ![]()
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