Welcome back to the All About Audiology podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Lilach Saperstein, and in this episode we are going to be answering the question, “Do cochlear implants work?” Even that question, you already know, is a little bit of a challenge to answer because, what do we mean by work? Do they help somebody hear and have access to sound? Do they make someone have normal hearing? What does someone even mean when they ask the question, do cochlear implants work? And so I have a fabulous interview with Dr. Lindsay Cockburn, who is a pediatric audiologist and also blogs and puts out lots of great resources on Instagram and on her blog, @listenwithlindsay. So we’re going to jump in to that interview in just a minute.

Before we start that interview, I do want to let you know that the next Hope Beyond Hearing program is starting on November 3rd. The program is a six week, online support group for parents of children with hearing loss. It’s really, really important to me that there’s an integration between the medical side of things, understanding the diagnosis and feeling empowered that you know how to read the audio-gram and that you know which intervention options are available to you, and that we focus on language development. That’s all one side of learning how to navigate being a parent to a child with a hearing loss and then there’s this whole other side, the emotional side. It can really be a struggle to address the shock and the grief sometimes, to be able to feel confident and hopeful that you are going to be a wonderful parent, that you are already a wonderful parent, but to give you some tools and not to neglect your own experience within this.

So I’m an audiologist. I see many, many families both as my role in the hospital where I’m a diagnostic and clinical cochlear implant audiologist, and also during my time being an educational audiologist and lots of you that I’ve connected with online. And I really understand the importance of YOUR health, YOUR ability to understand and cope with everything that’s coming, surrounding have a child with a hearing loss. And I feel like there’s not really a place where audiologists have the time or have the opportunity to be supportive in that way for parents. So I do want to tell you that the program will be running from November 3rd for six weeks, we’ll end right before the holidays in December. You’ll have access to a private Facebook group with the other parents, and we’ll be having weekly group calls, where we discuss various topics and really address YOUR heart, how you’ve been handling this and getting some great tools, like guided imagery and meditations and other exercises that we’ll do together in order to feel more confident, feel more prepared to be the advocate that your child needs.

We’re going to be talking about how to talk to family members about the diagnosis or the needs that your child has, how to advocate for them in school, and ways of building a strong, beautiful and connected relationship with your child and everyone within the family. So I come at this from the perspective of the audiologist because there are various circumstances that really come in to play when there is a hearing loss and that’s why I’ve put together this integrated program, the Hope Beyond Hearing program. And if you’re interested in learning more about that, all you have to do is visit allaboutaudiology.com/hope. You can go to the All About Audiology website and click on hope,