Joseph CascianiGeropsychologist, Consultant, Public Speaking, Freelance · Podcast Host of the Living to 100 Club | Clinical Strategies for Senior Residential Settings & Lifestyle Directors | Geropsychologist | Keynote Speaker

Health and Wealth: How to Make Them Last with Melinda Kruse DiPerna

12 Mar 2024 · 1 min

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In this segment of the Health and Wealth interview, the speaker explains why many individuals with hearing loss delay seeking help and underuse hearing aids. Over years of gradual hearing decline, people develop compensatory habits—repeating themselves, cupping their hand, turning up volume, and avoiding noisy environments—so they often don’t recognize the need for assistance until the problem becomes severe. The discussion highlights two main categories of barriers: psychological factors, such as denial and reliance on coping strategies, and age‑related physical challenges, including reduced finger dexterity and hand‑eye coordination that make handling small hearing‑aid devices and adjusting volume difficult. These combined issues contribute to the underutilization of hearing aids among older adults.

Chapters

The psychology of hearing loss and the fact that most people go more, many years, sometimes more than a decade before they get help where their hearing gradually declines. And over that gradual decline, they develop some compensatory strategies that help them get by. So that's one area that you have to sort of overcome. You know, you can go a long time asking people to repeat, cupping your hand behind your ear, turning up the volume, Avoiding noisy situations before it kind of comes to a head and you really start to have difficulty. So there's this whole psychological aspect. That's one area that causes hearing aids to be underutilized. Other areas have to do with just the aging process per se. Your finger dexterity, your hand-eye coordination as you get older sometimes starts to wane, and that can get in the way of using a very small device that has to go in and out of your ear and requires you to manipulate a volume either on the hearing aid or on a phone, a smartphone. There's another set of reasons.