“Both of our kids love their hearing aids, and we’ve seen tremendous progress. Both our kids were just tested this week by our speech pathologist as part of their annual review/new goals for speech therapy. Their language skills have improved so much (dyslexic with APD struggles)! The therapist is talking about discharge for our oldest and possibly just a few more months for our youngest. This is amazing considering we’ve only had the HAs for 9 months and our kids were years behind in their language skills.

It’s been a team effort between speech therapy, occupational therapy, and specialized programs for dyslexia remediation. Dr. Rachel Stout was the key for our kiddos, though! All the professionals who work with our children state that marked improvement occurred after we got the HAs.

Before getting her HAs, we spent a solid 2 years (using OG methods) working with our daughter on identifying her letters and associated sounds. She is dyslexic and has significant auditory processing issues. In 6 months, our daughter has not only finished learning her entire alphabet and associated sounds, but also just completed 71 levels of various phonemic awareness skills. Her progress and confidence has soared!

Thank you Dr. Rae. Update – Oct 2020 - We’ve worked with Dr. Rae for 2 of our children and will continue to work with her. She has helped them when no one else was able to. We’ve found her to be very accessible and informative. She goes above and beyond for her patients! ”

“My son has APD and hyperacusis. It made such a difference for my kiddo (now 13). It’s hard to explain how many things improved. And not everything improved in the same way, but the things that did.... amazing.

His working memory improved, his anxiety was reduced, his irritability was reduced, his ability to go places improved. He even says he would never go back to life before the HAs.

Do the trial.

Worst thing that happens is that it makes no difference at all.”

“I asked my 5 year old son what he likes best about his hearing aids. “I can hear. When there is sound and people are all talking, I can hear each one.”

He also said “It’s like they aren’t in my ears, but I can hear. It feels like my birthday and these are my present.””

“Sometimes when you see someone every day it can be hard to gauge whether changes are noticeable. One benefit to doing the trial over lockdown is that many people who know my son well haven’t seen him since he started the trial (we completed our initial and are now on an extended trial). This includes his teachers, as he got his aids about 2 weeks after schools closed.

Recently they had a few live Google Meet sessions for his class, and today I had the opportunity to speak to his teacher. She told me she was blown away by the difference.

My son has always had trouble with processing speed when asked a question, and it made conversations difficult and uncomfortable for him. That is now almost completely gone. She said she couldn’t believe how clear his speech had become, how quickly he responded to questions and conversations.

He was interrupting his classmates during the session, not in a negative way but that he had something he wanted to contribute to the conversation and by god he was going to say it. (In contrast to my encouraging him for years to not be afraid to do so because what he had to say was important too). To his teacher, by far and away, the biggest sign of improvement was the fact that she had turned the Google closed captioning on, and every word my son said in his sessions was transcribed accurately.
”

“My 9yr old hasn’t worn her hearing aids for about a week, since we went away on holiday. She did okay for the first few days because we were out in nature and swam a lot, so she didn’t need them as she does at school.

However, since we’ve been home, she has started having tics again. The hearing aids were without a doubt one of the things that resolved her tics, and this proves my theory again.

Low gain hearing aids work on far more than just hearing, memory, and understanding. They help with a lot of the other sensory aspects as well.”

“So here is our journey, which is long, BUT if I can help one person or family not have to go through the struggles that I have watched my son go through for over 10 years, then it is worth it. I may get under some people’s skin but I was once, in 2014, thinking that there is no way that hearing aids could help my son. My son had multiple ear infections growing up and had 3 sets of tubes in his ears and then 3 additional surgeries on his right ear to close the hole that was left when the tube fell out. One surgery was a skin graft and the other was a fat graft. (the skin graft was 2 1⁄2 hours long).

My son hears 100% with no background noise. But, with background noise (air conditioner running, water running, etc) I think, the right ear drops to 60% and the left 73%. I also at one time had an audiologist explain to me that the background noise bombards him 24/7.

My son was diagnosed with APD at 7 and also had decoding, memory fading tolerance, dyslexia, and organizational (some of the subtypes of APD have different names now). When my son was in the 3rd grade is when he realized that something was wrong, and he would ask me why his head would get so mixed up. For years, he was taking speech in school and also private speech twice a week.

I fought with the schools for years trying to get him help. I had one school in FL tell me that since they didn’t recognize APD then by law they didn’t have to do anything for him. At that time he was failing 3 classes, but within 2 weeks he was passing everything with a C and above and he would tell me that he did not know what was going on in the class and he would watch other students to try and figure out what he was suppose to do. We moved to OK and the entire time the schools kept saying he was at grade level, he had a 504, But the schools refused to give him an IEP. By the 8th grade my son still could not write a complete sentence (but hey since the schools said that he was at grade level I shouldn’t be concerned, Right?)

I ended up calling the special ed department in OK City because the school was refusing to do academic testing. The school finally did the testing after 6 months and the tests showed that he was significantly behind and in the 5th percentile in several categories. The school decided that they could give my son an IEP. For years my son was having 3 – 5 meltdowns a week. Instead of signing their IEP, I pulled my son out and started homeschooling him. ( I figured that I couldn’t do anything worse then what the schools had not done for him over the years). My son’s meltdowns went to about 1 every 6 months.

Approx 2 1⁄2 – 3 years ago, I came across Dr Rae, but at that time I was trying to figure out how to get to her state to do testing and thought that things should be done in person and I think that she was just getting started on doing things remotely?. So I messaged several audiologists in OK about doing trialing low gain hearing aids. All of them except one said that it could not be done using hearing aids for APD. One audiologist said that he had never done it but would be willing to try. So we did try them with him but he did not know how to program them correctly. The other audiologist did talk with Dr Rae, and Dr Rae was able to program them using his computer. By the way, before Dr Rae programmed them my son rarely used the hearing aids, but after she programmed them, then he wore them all the time. In I think Feb 2019, we got my son permanent low gain hearing aids through Dr Rae.

In regards to the differences that I noticed with my son wearing the hearing aids were not a “Oh Wow” moment. He would say that they helped him but couldn’t explain to me how they help him. The first thing that I did notice is that for years, when we would go to the store or run a lot of errands as soon as we got home he would go “chill out” in his room for several hours. He does not do that when his
hearing aids are in. He is able to stay in conversations and actually hear and understand what people are telling him.
Last August, he went to a tech school to learn painting automotive and he received honor society. For a young man who couldn’t write a complete sentence in the 8th grade, to making honor society is amazing to me. And it does help that the school is hands on. He will be 19 next month, and he has grown a lot and still needs some help. I think that for many many years his brain heard and processed things the wrong way and now it’s relearning itself. Not only that but my son still does not fully understand APD, and yes I and his speech therapists for years have tried to explain it to him, but even 3 years ago he thought that fireworks were causing his “hearing problems.”

We also had an audiologist tell me that he was using his hearing aids for appearances/attention, can you tell me one 17 year boy that would do that.

If you have read this far; my passion is to tell as many people as I can about trialing low gain hearing aids because if you don’t try then you never will know if they work. ALSO I know without a shadow of a doubt that if this technology would have been available when my son was 7 years old that he would not have had to struggle as much as he did. I remember one time him asking me why did God make him this way. Yes we had a long talk. For years I was always told that there was nothing that could be done for my son except that he had to learn strategies and coping skills. Think about it, if a person is able to filter the background noise that bombards them 24/7 (that a lot of us take for granted), and able to figure out where the sounds are coming from and also if they are able to “hear” the sounds/words correctly so that their brain can process it better, Isn’t it worth it. There were so many times that I cried at school meetings because I just wanted them to help him succeed and they failed him so many times.

My son is a very bright young man who has a passion to help others and will literally buy food to feed the homeless.
”

“My son uses low gain hearing aids for his APD. So we are heading into week 4 with our trial for our 9 yo. Last night we went to our yearly tradition called Walk Through Bethlehem. A local church has put it on 32 years and it is a huge setup of Bethlehem when Jesus was born. There is always a wait. During the wait you can sit in the church and hear live music. It is crazy loud. I had RJ’s aids in my purse and as soon as we walked in I could tell he was bothered by the noise.

As we sat I handed him his aids and immediately he calmed down. It was such a noticeable difference. This was the first time in 5 years we were able to sit and enjoy the music. They are amazing. It has changed his life. Low gain hearing aids is less about amplification and more about targeting the sound. Best decision we have ever made.”

“Now that our 8-year-old’s trial is over. We wanted to share all of our positive experiences. -Dr. Rae is fantastic. She is super knowledgeable and truly cares about her patients and what she does. We saw behavioral improvement.

He acknowledged us when we said his name even when the TV and other noises were occurring. We could have conversations with him as he was slower to become upset. He focused better and was less anxious. He didn’t yell when there was a loud noise or drop to the ground.

He still covers his ears out of habit but, doesn’t seem to be in pain anymore. He is generally happier and we were able to pull him off two mental health medications. One of which he had been on for 3 years.

We learned a lot about his experiences. Through his own explanations about what was different and a parent experience set up by Dr. Rachel. After the hearing aids were programmed we had a thunderstorm last night. He did not have anxiety from the thunder. He did not yell and nearly hyperventilate when the thunder roared. He was not glued to our side. In fact he played through the storm.

I had been hesitant on doing the trial. We talked about taking the leap for months. If you are looking for a sign to do the trial this is your sign...”

“Although, I am sure that everyone’s experience is different, I was surprised how quickly my son began self-correcting his speech errors. Many words that we, as parents and speech professionals, have been correcting for a LONG time are now being said correctly.

Within hours of beginning the trial, he would say a word incorrectly, that he has been saying wrong forever – pausing- and then saying it correctly! Now after weeks of “hearing” himself – these words are said correctly almost all the time with ZERO correction from others!

Update. He was in the third grade then- and I would have NEVER imagined how much of a difference this last 2 years have been academically. I cannot say we had this big “wow” moment when he started wearing them... more like a million little things that made his world better.

Update - Before his low gain HAs, he struggled with the overwhelming noise of the riding lawn mower and could not drive it, even though he wanted to! Now he not only drives it like a pro, he is not over-stimulated when finished, and feels such a level of self-pride! Update - It was the BEST thing we did for my son.

Thanksgiving will be 2 years from the start of our trial. He was in the third grade then- and I would have NEVER imagined how much of a difference this last 2 years have been academically.

I cannot say we had this big “wow” moment when he started wearing them... more like a million little things that made his world better.”

“My daughter’s face lit up as soon as she had the hearing aids in and turned on.... even before personal programming! It was amazing! Dr Rae is awesome! My daughter got her LGHAs last Christmas and the difference has been amazing. Dr. Rae is great to work with - my daughter loves her.

Update - Having received her aids just before Christmas, it was my daughters first day back at school today with them. She was a little apprehensive! But when I picked her up she just said everything was great. For the first time she could really hear the teacher in Assembly in the hall! And she so enjoyed break time being able to hear and follow her friends and making joining in so much easier.

She also said they were as good in the classroom as her previous FM system was (possibly even a bit better - this may be as she only had 1 ear piece for it!) possibly even a bit better!! She said she did play about a bit with the settings to see which was best in the different environments, but was very happy with them. Best decision made since Katie’s diagnosis!”

“My daughter was diagnosed with CAPD and dyslexia when she was 9 yrs old. She was struggling so much with reading, spelling and conversations with peers and large groups. I searched everywhere and found the ear filter by Able Kids.

I was a mom trying to find anything to help her. We flew to Colorado and was tested with severe APD. The ear filter helped her for the first year but then seemed to not be as effective for her. Here I was searching the internet for any possible ideas to help my little girl feel less anxious, frustrated. She was always such a happy go lucky kiddo, but as she started to get in older grades and more loud bigger groups in school it was really becoming frustrating to her. Her neuropsych evaluation also showed several weaknesses.

One day, I feel like it was Fate, I stumbled upon Dr.Rae. I had no idea who she was but I knew we had to try this low gain hearing trial she was offering. We hopped into the car and headed down to MD from NH. I’m so glad we did.

Since the low gain hearing aids over 2 years ago Lilli has done amazingly! She plays 3 musical instruments harp, drums, steel drums and cello.’she has won several art awards, has gotten straight A’s all 6 and 7th grade and best yet her re evaluation of her neuropsych two weeks ago showed more strengths than weakness!!!! And her IQ in 4 years increased by 15 points.

It has been an amazing few years, and I feel like the low gain hearing aids along with music has helped so much in her growth!!!

Thank you Dr. Rachel Walters Stout.

I don’t know where Lilli would be without this opportunity you have given her/us!”