Do Cochlear Implants Work? Episode 25 with Dr. Lindsay Cockburn

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, the link is also in my Instagram bio, and you can sign up there as well. Send me a quick DM or an email to learn more!!!

Let’s go ahead and jump in for our very interesting interview discussing, “Do cochlear implants work?”

Welcome back to the All About Audiology podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Lilach Saperstein and today I have a special guest, another audiologist with me and we’re going to be talking about, cochlear implants. Do cochlear implants really work? That is a question that I’ve gotten from a number of people and it’s not an easy answer. So here with me today is, Dr. Lindsay Cockburn, from Los Angeles. She and I are going to be talking about this today.

LS: “Welcome Lindsay, tell us more about yourself.”

LC: “Hi, I’m Lindsay Cockburn, I’m a pediatric audiologist at John Tracey Center, which used to be John Tracey Clinic. I do mostly diagnostic testing, which means I test babies and kids hearing. John Tracey Clinic/Center is really famous and they have been helping people all over the world for 75 years, helping children to listen and speak, so it’s a listening and spoken language center. We have a parent/infant program. We have a preschool with kids with hearing loss. We have telephone practice therapy with Auditory Verbal Therapists. They have little apartments set up so it simulates being at home where they do therapy one on one with the kids. They have a program every summer, where families come from all over the world and they stay in Los Angeles for two weeks with their preschool aged kids with hearing loss, where the parents are in an intensive program where they take classes and have counseling groups and see the different professionals. And the kids are in the preschool class and get AVT (Auditory Verbal Therapy) speech therapy and audiology appointments. So I work with families all over the world, all kinds of different kids and families with hearing aids, cochlear implants. I’ve actually worked with a lot of kids with Auditory Brainstem implants, which is not what we are talking about today, but that’s another kind of implant. So I’ve seen all kinds of kids from all different places all over the world with cochlear implants.”

LS: “That is amazing. Wonderful that you have such a broad range of patients and ages, where they are from, all that totally goes into how they end up doing with their hearing aids.”

LC: “Yeah, absolutely. These parents come to the center and learn all these different things. They are so amazing. They take it back to where they live and they are so motivated, so they start their own groups, their own support groups and programs that are similar to what we have. It really revolutionized how different countries help kids with hearing loss and what kind of services they offer them because these parents went back to their countries and demanded it.”

LS: “That’s so interesting. So I’m from New York and I recently moved to Israel. I started working at a cochlear implant center in Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, in the north of Israel. I’m relatively new to the cochlear implant scene so I’m very interested in learning and hearing more about your experiences, specifically with these questions, who can get a cochlear implant? Who is it for? Who can it help? And who is not a candidate? So we’re going to start with talking about candidacy, which just means who can have this and who is it good for?”

LC: “Cochlear implants are devices for people with hearing loss, who don’t get the benefit that they are looking for out of hearing aids. So if a person wants to use their residual hearing to listen and to talk, they need to have a certain amount of hearing in order to do that. You have to be able to hear the different sounds in order to say them. So if hearing aids are not powerful enough to give you the ability to hear all the different sounds of speech clearly, then you are not going to be able to speak clearly, unless you get a cochlear implant.

So cochlear implants involves a surgery where electrodes are placed into the inner ear, into the cochlea. They used to wipe out the rest of your hearing, now things have changed for a lot of people who are maintaining their residual hearing and they are no longer losing that little bit that they have left. Then they close it up and a couple weeks later, they put the outside device on. It looks kind of like a hearing aid and it takes the sound into the device and it has a little computer in it where it changes the sound into electrical impulses that electrically stimulate your hearing nerve, which is very fancy, but basically it bypasses the way that your ear normally works and helps you to be able to hear all the different sounds clearly, eventually. But, it’s not a miracle, it isn’t like glasses where you put it on and things are changed. It takes a lot of practice, especially because it’s not on just your ear, it’s working on your brain. Your brain needs to practice hearing all of the different sounds in order to make sense of the different sounds, in order to have meaning in the different sounds. It takes lots and lots and lots of rehabilitation.”

LS: “We hear with our brains that the ears are just what is bringing it in. Yep, we say that all the time. Hahaha.”

LC: “Yeah so people who can get a cochlear implant depends on where you live and what the regulations are at this point in the US. It depends on your health insurance really and how much you push. Kids can get as young as about six months old with a cochlear implant. There’s no age limit for a cochlear implant. If you are healthy enough to undergo surgery, even someone who is 100, you can get an implant.”

LS: “Yeah, and that’s also going to continue going up and up as people live healthier and longer lives. Which is such an interesting thing now. I wasn’t as aware of this but we do have a number of patients in our center who are in their 80s and they’re rockin’ it. Hahaha.”

LC: “Exactly!”

LS: “I hadn’t heard of that because so much of what we do he