Poor hearing is not just an annoying inconvenience. The earsplitting sound of ambulance sirens in New York City is surely hastening the day when I and many others repeatedly subjected to such noise will be forced to get hearing aids. I just hope this doesn’t happen before 2021 or so when these devices become available over-the-counter and are far less expensive and perhaps more effective than they are now. Currently, hearing aids and accompanying services are typically not covered by medical insurance, Medicare included. Such coverage was specifically excluded when the Medicare law was passed in 1965, a time when hearing loss was not generally recognized as a medical issue and hearing aids were not very effective, said Dr. Frank R. Lin, who heads the Cochlear Center for Hearing and Public Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Now a growing body of research by his colleagues and others is linking untreated hearing loss to several costly ills, and the time…

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Once considered an inconvenience of getting older, age-related hearing loss has emerged as a critical public health issue. When Frank Lin, MD, PhD ’08, looks up from his desk, his eyes often fall upon President Donald Trump’s jagged signature. And that always makes him smile.  That signature is on a framed copy of the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act that hangs on Lin’s office wall. An associate professor in Epidemiology and Mental Health at the Bloomberg School and of Otolaryngology and Medicine at the School of Medicine, Lin helped create the legislation, which the president signed into law last year. Lin’s copy also bears handwritten notes of appreciation to him from Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Grassley, two of the five cosponsors of the bipartisan act, which designates a new category of hearing aids. Consumers with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss will be able to acquire these OTC hearing aids without seeing an audiologist, just as a self-diagnosed farsighted…

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The Question - My father is going deaf, but he refuses to wear a hearing aid. Is there any way to make him come to his senses? The Answer....

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