The biggest single issue that plagues the whole hearing aid industry is the environment that our products have to work in. There are two environments that hearing aids are exposed to. The first is the “outside” and that could be heat, cold, rain, snow and even the occasional hot shower when people forget to take their hearing aids off. The second environment is the “inside” and that is the ear canal which is hot, waxy and moist – none of which are appreciated by the delicate electronics of modern day hearing aids. This environment is the cause of the vast majority of “failures” and it causes immense frustration to consumer, retailers and manufacturers alike. Consumers feel that the products should be designed to work in the ear and therefore should work. Manufacturers bow to consumers natural desire for tiny invisible products and this limits the protection that they can build in between the hostile environment and their delicate electronics. The retailers get caught in the middle!
To combat this most
in-the-ear hearing aids have a wax guard which is a physical barrier between the environment and the hearing aid speaker or receiver which provides the sound output. There are a wide variety of different hearing aids from a number of different manufacturers and these products use a wide variety of different wax protection systems, which incidentally do not just seek to protect from wax but also the natural moisture that exists within the ear canal.
Consumers do not choose which wax protection system they have. Hearing aids choice is not passed to the consumer as invariably products are recommended by professionals. The professionals should consider which wax system is being used as some are considerable easier to handle than others, so if an elderly person with limited dexterity was to be fitted with an in-the-ear hearing aid it could be advisable to have a wax system that is easy to change as the consumer has to do this as a regular part of their hearing aid maintenance.
HearingDirect therefore is not seeking to encourage consumer intervention in the selection of wax protection systems but it trying to make life easier for ongoing maintenance and hearing aid care. Hearing aid user can now go to HearingDirect’s dedicated
Wax Guard category and buy their wax guard refills from
Phonak, Widex,
Siemens,
ReSound and
Oticon.
A word of caution - while some of the wax cleaning kits are specific to a particular manufacturer others can be used across a wider range of products. To this end, in some cases we have not been manufacturer specific but have focused on the wax system name. For instance the Widex Cerustop is listed simply as
Cerustop Wax Guards. There are clear images and as these will be replacement products there should be no difficulty in recognising them, however as a final security the wax guards are covered by our 30 day money back guarantee as is everything supplied by the HearingDirect.com website.
