Smart Hearing – by Katherine Bouton

The author’s hearing loss began in her 30s, and now she’s in her 70s with even less hearing, and/but much more experience. Having worked at the Hearing Loss Association of America for much of that time, she has a lot to share.

This book is a practical guide to adult-onset hearing loss, and aims to help the reader navigate not just the difficulties inherent to the condition, but also the complexities around it that are largely societal, administrative, financial, and so forth.

She advocates for early intervention where possible, and that most people in the early stages of hearing loss don’t realize what’s happening. They will tend to just blame the noisy environment, or the speaker, for example. And beyond just hearing tests, she recommends specifics that you might not have heard of, such as the speech-in-noise test.

With regard to technology, she covers the various options,and also ways to pay for them (because Medicare won’t)—which latter is specific to the US, so if you’re from somewhere else, then probably a) this advice won’t help, but b) you probably won’t need it, as most places have more comprehensive healthcare coverage.

The style is quite personal while remaining professional; she often uses her own story as an illustration, but covers experiences other than hers just as thoroughly, so that no major variant of hearing loss gets overlooked.

Bottom line: if you and/or a loved one aren’t hearing/understanding auditory things so well as you used to, this book can help guide you into a position of more practical empowerment, without the need for quite so much trial and error as you might otherwise find alone.

Click here to check out Smart Hearing, and live better with hearing loss!