Your Audiologist

Hearing Health Care of San Marcos provides both advanced diagnostic and general hearing evaluation services in a boutique clinical style with personal attention to your hearing health care. We accept many insurance plans, including Blue Cross, HealthNet, and Medicare. Discounts are also available for our patients who have Secure Horizons or Kaiser insurance plans. Please mention your insurance at the time of your call.

Hearing Aids
You are unique and your hearing problem is unique. A hearing aid is custom designed and tailored for each individual hearing loss, for each ear shape and size, and for every function and life style. Hearing aid technology and the small size of hearing aids that are cosmetically appealing are helping to redefine people's perceptions of what it means to wear a hearing aid, and their idea of what it means to hear and communicate better.

Hearing aids involve a prescription for your ears to help you hear better, much like glasses involve a prescription for eyes to help you see better. Different people react differently to the use of a hearing aid. Hearing aids do not restore normal hearing. Age, the severity of the hearing loss, how long you have had the hearing loss, and the acceptance of the need for the hearing device strongly influence how a person reacts to amplified sound.

Advancements in hearing technology and the size of hearing aids make them more cosmetically appealing. Realistic expectations of what a hearing aid can and cannot do, and taking the time to adjust to hearing amplification, will significantly improve your ability to hear and communicate with hearing aids.

Degrees of Hearing Loss
After measuring hearing loss via clinical audiometry, it is typical that the Audiologist speaks about the hearing loss in terms of degree of loss. The method of establishing these degrees depends largely upon the amount of communication handicap that results from the loss. While the handicapping effect of the hearing loss will certainly differ in any individual, there are some common points that are relatively universal. They are different for children versus adults.

How Human Hearing Works
The ears of humans and most animals function similarly. The ears work to change sounds in the environment (acoustic energy) into energy that can be analyzed by the brain (neural energy, electro-chemical energy). Fish need to change hydro-mechanical vibrations into neural energy to be able to 'hear'. Most mammalian ears function the same way, although the ways in which the neural energy is used differs vastly.

The human ear is divided into three general parts; this division is based upon function and anatomy. But, divisions are also important with respect to diseases or damage that occur in people's ears, for reasons of correction of these diseases or damages. Your Audiologist will discuss these topics with you at the time of your appointment.