Four current audiology students at the University of Texas at Dallas have hearing issues that bring an extra understanding when relating to clients during their daily work. Just 3 to 5 per cent of audiologists experience a degree of hearing loss, according to Audiology Today but supervisors and peers now agree that these insights are an asset to the profession.
Entering Speech Pathology & Audiology Fields
In the United States, students with some level of hearing issues now complete degrees in speech-language pathology and audiology, a pattern that was unthinkable ten years ago.
Educational audiologist Dr Carrie Spangler and her peers who work in the hearing and speech fields confirm this lived experience with particular empathy for their clients.
Johns Hopkins University’s Deaf Health Initiative
Elsewhere in the medical field, Johns Hopkins University is taking a lead with a Deaf Health Initiative to improve healthcare access for people who’re deaf across the United States.
One role model at the biomedical engineering department is Tilak Ratnanather, who wore hearing aids in Sri Lanka as an infant and was educated in the UK and US. He has increased deaf student participation in the auditory sciences nationwide in the US, to ten in 2015, with another fifteen pursuing graduate programs in the field.
[People] who might be the most effective at doing the research to help deaf [people] are the deaf themselves. Helping hearing impaired [people] succeed in the demanding STEM field will lead to greater and more profound advances in auditory research.
Hearing Deaf Patients’ Requests And Needs
Joseph Heng, a current internal medicine resident at Johns Hopkins University, received auditory-verbal therapy with hearing-aids as a child before a cochlear implant at age twelve.
STEM subjects are becoming more accessible to students who grow up with hearing and speech services and have natural insights to the medical and technical processes involved. Online support groups for medical and technical professionals who’re deaf are also available for members to access mentoring and peer coaching as needed.
