Dear Readers,

It's been an interesting month at TAI.  It started when new hearing aids of two of our patients began mysteriously turning off and "rebooting" several times a minute.  Newer hearing aids play a pleasant little ditty when they start up, but it's not so pleasant when that tune repeats 3 or 4 times a minute. After ruling out ghosts, we performed our usual diagnostics and treatments.  We even sent one set of aids in for repair.  But, the problem persisted, and that's when it got interesting!

When we can't figure something out, we usually resort to wearing the offending instruments ourselves to see if we can get some leads.  Holly did the honors this time and got a lot more than leads out of it.  She wore the misbehaving hearing aids after replacing the patient's ear tips with new, clean tips for her ears. So far, so good. Then she got a spontaneous invitation to attend an NCAA game at McHale and that's when her luck changed.

For years, we've cautioned patients to use ear protection at McHale but ... Holly forgot. Even worse, she wore the hearing aids into McHale where the noise assaulted her. Whipping the aids off in a frenzy, she put them away, found old ear plugs at the bottom of her purse, and put them in. 

 For years, we've cautioned patients to put only CLEAN ear plugs in their ears and throw out used ones, but ... Holly forgot. Two days later, she was at the health clinic with a right ear infection. 

For years, we've cautioned patients to check the ear tips when they remove their hearing aids, but ... Holly forgot. She whipped the hearing aids out at McHale, not realizing the left tip stayed in her ear. She made matters worse by pushing the ear protector down in that ear. Confusion reigned: the doctor couldn't figure out what was deep in her left ear and Holly couldn't figure out why he was attending to that ear instead of the one that hurt!    Ultimately, he removed the tip, she realized what she'd done, and everyone agreed that Holly's license to practice audiology should go under review.

But, back to our patients and their misbehaving hearing aids.  This is interesting because we think we've found a villain.  New regulations require all new hearing aid batteries to be mercury free. One patient started having the boot-up problem after he purchased mercury-free batteries at the drugstore. Those batteries were smaller than our regular batteries and actually fell out of his hearing aids.  Since then, we've been measuring batteries like mad and the plot is thickening. Even some "old" batteries with mercury from local drugstores are coming up short on measurements and creating the boot-up problem for our other patient.  

You can read the whole sordid story at our blog: http://tucsonaudiology.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/battery-alert-a-silly-millimeter-smaller/

Meanwhile, we're continuing to measure and we're waiting for the hearing aid manufacturers to clue us in.  The one sure thing we are advising is DO NOT BUY YOUR BATTERIES FROM DRUGSTORES.  We've measured and tested our stock of mercury-free batteries and they are functioning fine so far, so we recommend that you get your supplies from our stock until such time as the industry corrects the boot-up problem and gets all batteries to a standard size.