NHS hearing units misdiagnosed thousands of children and ‘did nothing’

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/thousands-children-failed-by-nhs-audiology-misdiagnosed-deafness-lj0ndgxrd

Posted by boycecodd

5 Comments

  1. haikubotichooseyou on

    Wow.

    I was born half deaf in the 80s. Nothing “got done” and I was too young to understand whether I needed or had any options. I’m deaf in one ear.

    I still wonder, with all the wild tech, whether they could give me full hearing. But I tried in 2015, and had a consultant say smth like “Probably missing a nerve or something” without more than 5 minutes of talking to me and he shooed me away.

  2. MyCatIsAFknIdiot on

    Boots Hearing care over-prescribed me hearing aids to the tune of £3.5k

    Got the money back, but it took 6 months!
    Thieving, robbing bastards

  3. Doesn’t suprise me in the slightest.

    My elderly mother went for a hearing test last year as she tells us she can’t understand what we say sometimes when we’re talking to her (especially if there is background noise).

    The response from the NHS hearing test… you “may or may not” have hearing loss. I asked them for greater clarity and they proudly proclaimed that she was in the (no pun intended) grey area as to whether she could hear well or not.

    Staggers me to no end that something as scientific as measuring if people can or cannot hear fucking tones at different resonances and that the structure of the inner ear is Ok or not (through an examination) cannot come back with a binary answer. Especially considering that the media equipment R&D industry is worth billions every year (creating ever more precise and hypersensitve mics, etc which can end up in medical devices).

    Yet here we are, monkeys with tools telling people no idea.

  4. Unsurprising.

    Was mowing grass one day, right ear popped and suddenly hearing was muffled. 10 mins later it was the same, the next day it was joined by a never-ending ringing sound.

    I was 25, never went to concerts, or anything to damage said hearing and lost 50% of my hearing in my right ear and have had tinnitus ever since in the span of a day.

    Back and forth trying to get in touch with a specialist, 3 months later got an appointment, quick ear test, confirmed my hearing is worse and said it might improve in the next year and to pray it comes back.

    No options, no reason for why it happened, just the new normal. I’m 29 now and just accepted it.

  5. I was pretty much completely deaf, bar some low frequencies from 1977-June 1980. It wasn’t picked up on tests because I could lip read, read, see the body language of the tester… I was ‘a good little girl, quiet, always lost in a book’ and did fine on written tests, so all the effort went to supporting the kids who couldn’t read and write yet. My toddler brother’s hearing loss got picked up first, even though he’s 5 years younger than me. By the time it was operated on I’d permanently lost high frequencies, and had had a lot of head injuries, thanks to it affecting my balance.

    I hoped we’d *improved* in the last 50 years.