no vaccine for deafness, page-6

re: no vaccine for deafness (graphs fixed) Sorry to shake the parrot's feathers jolly old boy, but for a person promoting cochlear with such derogatory remarks about others, I think you should first learn the basics of a cochlear implant. Your posts indicate your lack of knowledge about this ingenious device.

"Cochlear will aim more at the older population. an implant is superior to a hearing aid. a hearing aid simply amplifies sound wheras an implant is a computer that turns noise into sound. the new ones sit behind the ear..there is no douby that the older population is a market which Cochlear would like to develop"

This depends on what you call superior. A cochlear implant converts sound vibrations to digital charactors that have no resemblance to the words we hear. It can be compared more to the sounds heard through a pc modem. For a person with a hearing deficiancy, it is NOT superior to aids.

For the profoundly deaf, where aids do not assist it is a dream come true. However, the person has to be trained to learn the digital sounds and match them to the meaning of the written word. This is why they are so successful with babies and young children, who were always deaf and do not have to be retrained from the beginning. Also people this age learn lip reading skills much faster than older people.

You will never find a hearing specialist recommending cochlear implants for anybody simply with a percentage of hearing loss, and even more so with aged people.
I do know this because I have discussed it at length with hearing specialists. My son has only 10% hearing on low frequencies in one ear, and 25% in the other, caused by nerve damage from his rare immune system disorder. They still consider hearing aids for him to be better than implants, and he was only 25 years old at the time.

Cochlear implants are for the profoundly deaf, with a strong emphasis on very young people.

So pirate, put that in yer parrot and squawk it, you old ramp machine!

Bomber