It’s difficult to imagine a single day life when we can’t hear the world. There are many cases of hearing impaired patients coming from all over India in many of the hospitals including Max healthcare, Fortis Hospital, Apollo Hospital etc. Audiology is a study that deals with the imperfections in hearing and evaluating them as per the imperfections occurring in the patient. The branch deals with the medical science which provides the best available medical technology to solve the hearing disorder of the patients. The problem of hearing is not limited to hearing only it even affects the communication skill of the person as without hearing a person we cannot respond properly. If we go through the medical reports then we will realize that there are many cases in which parents are tensed as their children are not a good speaker like there are people who have issues in their mouth and they can’t even pronounce the words which are quite common. Recent researches witness the developments in audiology department like there are instruments introduced for hearing impaired persons and speech therapy. The speech therapy is designed in such a way that it works on improving speech and comprehending as well as expressing language.
Treatment of Hearing impairment- the devices like hearing aids are introduced for treating the hearing disorders patients and the cochlear implant is also one of them. Though cochlear implant works more efficient than hearing aids as it acts as an exact copy of the damaged parts and transfers the sound signals to the brain. It helps those who have problems in both the ears either moderate or extreme and in the case if the hearing aids don’t work on the patient.
Advantages of Cochlear implant:
- It works more efficiently than the hearing aids.
- Sentence understanding level reaches up to 80%.
- Makes it quite easy for a patient to feel comfortable even in the high noise environment.
- It makes the disabled person enjoy their life by listening to music, talking to their dear ones on phones.
- It helps the patients to communicate and converse and make them feel safer.
Speech Therapy- the therapy works verbally and non-verbally both. There are different approaches used for treating the patient and that depends upon the intensity of the disorder. There are many activities which are introduced to help the patients recover from their disorder. The activities include physical exercises, speech drills and the practice of sound production. The problems which are included under speech therapy are stammering, speech delay and misarticulation of language etc. occurring mostly in children.
Reasons for speech disorder- there are numerous reasons of a person having speech disorder issues as it may happen due to psychological trauma and some congenital defects like cerebral palsy and cleft palate. The problem of speech disorder is not only limited to children there are certain cases of old aged or grown-ups too. They may face the issue of losing communication skills due to several reasons like stroke, any accident or removal of the larynx (due to cancer in any part of the body).
Benefits of Speech Therapy-
- It improves the ability of patients to express the ideas, thoughts, and feelings of the patients.
- It provides better life quality to the patients.
- It enhances school readiness skills.
- Self-esteem of the person reaches a higher level.
- It increases the vocal quality and helps in making the speech fluent.
Note: Children having delay speech problem should be taken for the therapy before completing three years of age as it is the age when the brain starts thinking maturely and learning process is so fast at this age.
Limitations of Speech Therapy-
- Time-consuming- the therapy takes too much of time both of parents and child.
- Cost- as the duration of the therapy is so long and so the cost of the therapy is also very high. The therapy is not covered under Private Health Insurance plans.
- Missed Sessions- due to any reason it may possible that the therapy session gets missed which gives a negative consequence on the therapy.
