These subjective impressions do not negate the need for objective, preferably blinded, research efforts. Of course, we cannot ignore the testimony of our clients regarding their experiences with some new hearing aid or speech processing strategy. And, of course, an audiologist's clinical experience with a particular feature or speech processing strategy must be given due weight. Certainly, we all want to see our clients improve their functional hearing capacities because of the hearing aids we select for them. And, compared to the unaided condition, there's no doubt that most do.
Hearing aids are unquestionably an effective way of reducing the handicap of hearing loss.
Because of practical and logistical reasons, however, we have no way of knowing whether a client will do even better with some other speech processing strategy or hearing aid. We don't know, for example, whether an additional number of bands or modifications of the numerous parameters of a compression system would improve a client's performance even more. This is, however, precisely the kind of information that should be available from a corpus of clinical research studies. As a discipline that claims to be scientifically based, we should be able to do better. For example, let us consider the research that has been and is being conducted with cochlear implants.