Good Neighbor Podcast South Charlotte
Bringing Together Local Businesses and Neighbors of South Charlotte.
Good Neighbor Podcast South Charlotte
Ep. #81 Dr. King's Guide to Audiology and Cognitive Health
What if the key to preventing cognitive decline was as simple as addressing hearing loss? Join us as we chat with Dr. Allison King from Palmetto Family Hearing Center in Waxhaw about the profound impact of hearing health on our overall well-being. Inspired by her mother's work as a speech-language pathologist, Dr. King found her passion in audiology, dedicating her career to helping individuals reclaim their auditory world. We explore the personalized care offered by her small practice and dive into the cutting-edge advancements in hearing aid technology, including Bluetooth-enabled devices and the virtually invisible Lyric. Learn why early detection and baseline hearing tests are crucial for proactive hearing health.
Dr. King also shares enlightening insights on the often-overlooked link between untreated hearing loss and dementia, underscoring the importance of professional care over DIY solutions. Discover how regular hearing aid testing and recalibration can optimize their performance, similar to updating prescription glasses. We also tackle earbud safety, focusing on volume control to prevent damage. Beyond audiology, Dr. King discusses her deep involvement in the Waxhaw community, highlighting the holistic approach Palmetto Family Hearing takes toward patient care. Get ready to enhance your understanding of hearing health and explore the vibrant local audiology scene with us.
Palmetto Family Hearing Center
Dr. Allison King
703 W. South Main St. Suite D
Waxhaw, NC 28173
(704) 256-4370
info@palmettofamilyhearing.com
palmettofamilyhearing.com/contact./#waxhaw
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Regina League.
Speaker 2:Welcome everyone to another episode of the Good Neighbor Podcast here in South Charlotte. My name is Regina League and I'm the owner of South Charlotte Media Group and what I do is interview local businesses so you can get to know them more and what sets them apart. Today we have Dr Allison King with Palmetto Family Hearing Center in Waxhaw. Welcome, dr King. Dr Allison, how are you?
Speaker 3:Hi Regina, Thanks for having me. I'm well. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2:Great. I always love to point out to our listeners when I come across the unicorn. For those people who don't know what that is, it's a native Charlottean, because they're so rare. So, my goodness, that is very rare.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you. I was born and raised in the Charlotte area, went to high school in Charlotte. I left for a few years to go to college but my husband and I live in Waxhaw now, so I've kind of settled back near the Charlotte area. Love it here.
Speaker 2:I love it too, so I'd love to know a little bit about the early years and what got you into this industry and how you decided that this was your path.
Speaker 3:Sure. So my mom was a speech language pathologist and growing up she always had fun stories about some of the kids that she worked with and that she helped, you know, improve their speech, articulation and so forth. So when I went to Appalachian I thought I wanted to study speech and hearing disorders, and my first class in audiology really opened my eyes to an allied health care profession that needed a lot of a lot of help. You know an area that needed new professionals, with the baby boomers growing in population and in age, it was you know, an area where I saw I could probably really make a difference and help people.
Speaker 3:I could probably really make a difference and help people and it's a you know, it was really more black and white than the speech rehabilitation process. Doing the audiology was a bit more black and white for me and just really, you know, drew me into working with people but also doing something medically based as well.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. What drew you to going on board with Palmetto Family Hearing Center?
Speaker 3:Gary Fike is the owner of this small business and he opened his Fort Mill location in 2014. And we've been colleagues for a long time. We actually did our doctorate together at the University of Florida and we both left large practices to work in a small practice where we really could just spend more time with our patients, give a more personalized, you know treatment plan to our patients and have an office environment where people feel comfortable, they feel welcomed. We know them by name, the front desk knows them by name, and it's just been really nice to work in a smaller practice where we can have more flexibility to just spend more time with our patients.
Speaker 2:So obviously you work with patients with hearing loss, but tell us a little about the things you guys offer and the age ages you uh that are your patients.
Speaker 3:Sure, we work with children and adults, mostly school-aged children and up. We don't have a lot of the equipment required to test newborns, for example, but school-aged children, high schoolers, young adults um, you know all all ages are welcome to our practice. Most people with hearing loss are under the age of 65. So it's something that not everybody thinks about seeking out hearing care, but we offer that here in our practice comprehensive hearing testing and hearing aids for all ages.
Speaker 2:You know there's such a stigma about wearing a hearing aid. What are some of the advancements that have been made so that people you know understand if you should do it if you can't hear? And another thing is when do you know when you should come and get tested?
Speaker 3:Sure. So some signs that you're not hearing as well as you used to be might be that you're turning the TV up louder or you're asking your loved ones whom you live with to repeat themselves. Or maybe you're turning the TV up louder or you're asking your loved ones whom you live with to repeat themselves. Or maybe you're going to a restaurant or a social gathering and you don't feel very confident because you're missing some of what's being said, You're having to focus too hard or, you know, struggle with all the background noise that you sometimes pick up in a restaurant. So those are the key things that people really start to notice when they're not hearing as well as they used to be. And a baseline hearing test will not just show if there's some hearing loss, but to what degree that hearing loss is present and if you need to seek out, you know, further assistance for your hearing loss, so you know the
Speaker 3:advances really in the last few years is just what digital technology has been able to do for hearing aids. Just the way digital technology has changed the cell phone and computer industry. Hearing aids are much smaller than they used to be. In most cases they're rechargeable, bluetooth compatible. They use artificial intelligence to know the difference between speech and background noise. Really good hearing aids use directional microphone technology, wind noise reduction. So there are all kinds of cool advances in technology just in the last, I would say, five to 10 years with hearing aids that's super cool.
Speaker 2:I saw on your website you have something called invisible hearing aid. I mean, is it literally?
Speaker 3:invisible. There are a couple of products that are literally invisible. One of them that we sell in our practice is a product called Lyric, and it's an extended wear device that sits deep in the ear canal and it stays for a period of time. So you don't have to remove it at night, you don't have to remember to put it back in in the morning, you can bathe in it and it is completely invisible.
Speaker 2:Yes, who's a candidate for that?
Speaker 3:You know you should not have had ear surgery in the past or a lot of wax problems. But other than that most hearing losses can be fitted with the Lyric device.
Speaker 2:So I was on your website and I'm going to pronounce it the way I think it's pronounced tinnitus and explain what that is.
Speaker 3:The medical term for that is tinnitus, but it's often accepted in the public views to be pronounced tinnitus, and tinnitus or tinnitus is phantom noise in the ears, meaning there's a ringing, a buzzing, a humming, some sort of sound that someone hears in their ear or even in their head that isn't, you know, heard by anyone else, and it often accompanies a hearing loss, meaning it's one of the symptoms or signs that you may have a hearing loss if you develop some ringing in your ears.
Speaker 2:You know one thing I didn't realize until you know, going on your website, that if you don't address hearing loss early, it does worsen. Is that true for a senior as well?
Speaker 3:It does it does. It's kind of like not using that. You know muscle that atrophies over time. So if we're not using those, you know, those hearing networks to the brain, those pathways from the ear to the brain, they're not being stimulated enough, they can worsen more rapidly. We're also seeing more evidence in the research that cognition is affected long term if you don't treat a hearing loss. So the field of neurology is doing lots and lots of research in the area of dementia and one of their findings, as they're researching dementia, is that hearing loss is the number one modifiable risk factor for cognitive decline.
Speaker 2:Wow, wow. So that leads me to believe that when you get hearing aids as you age, they constantly get tweaked, so you're still declining your hearing loss even though you have the hearing aids.
Speaker 3:They can. It can continue to decline, just usually at a lesser rate. So what we do is we repeat the testing every year and we recalibrate the hearing aids for that new prescription, not so different than when you have your eyes examined and you get a new prescription for your eyeglasses. We do the testing annually and then we reprogram or recalibrate the devices accordingly, gotcha.
Speaker 2:So what do you think of earbuds? Are they bad?
Speaker 3:just having that right up against our ears, like that as long as you're setting the volume of earbuds you know to a comfortable level, if other people can hear it. It's probably too loud. You know, if you're using it for long periods of time at the gym and turning it up loud to drown out noise, you know the equipment and the background music and that kind of thing then you may be listening to them too loud. But overall they're safe.
Speaker 2:Yes, I have been around people like that. Now that you say, are there any misconceptions? I'm just thinking to myself, like going to you guys versus a big box store. Tell us a little bit about that, the benefits work.
Speaker 3:Tell us a little bit about that. The benefits Sure. All hearing aids are not created equal. So when you look at different devices that are out there in the marketplace, you have to really know what you're getting and what you're buying. When you come to a medical practice, you're going to be evaluated medically to rule out other things that could be causing your hearing loss, and you're also going to get access to the latest technology that's engineered by the companies that sell this technology and it's going to have all the latest features as well as follow-up care. A hearing aid is not going to help if patients aren't coming in and getting the right kind of follow-up care for those devices over the time or the right kind of care for their ears over time. So it's really critical that the patients stay on a continuum of care when they get devices.
Speaker 3:So I would say you know, one of the misconceptions is that you can buy over-the-counter hearing aids or you can buy something in a box store and that's it. You just don't ever need to go back to see a professional. The professional component of fitting the device and maintaining that device for patients over time is really critical to the patient's success.
Speaker 2:Gotcha. I mean, the analogy is perfect with your eye care. Once you need glasses. You know, that's it. What are you most proud of as you look back over? You know your journey.
Speaker 3:Oh wow, I mean I think it's just, it's just great to help people. You know, I mean this is a helping profession and you'd really just help people to get back into their world. When they start hearing better again, People are more confident. They're more engaged with their grandchildren, their spouse, their loved ones, their friends, and I have I've met people over the years who have really isolated from social settings because of their hearing loss, and once they get the right technology, they're just happier and more confident. It's just such a quality of life issue. So I think just helping so many people over the years is what I would be most proud of.
Speaker 2:Well, and you just mentioned something you know with aging parents, it's hard for the people around them when they can't hear. Well, so for everyone it's a good thing just to deal with that and take care of it. So when you're not working, what do you like to do for fun?
Speaker 3:Well, I have two children. I have two boys, 10 and 14. So right now, I spend a lot of my time watching sports and playing sports with them, and my husband, of course. So yeah, we're a sports family, you could say.
Speaker 2:So that's a lot of what we do in our free time. What do you love about living and?
Speaker 3:working in the Waxhaw community. It's amazing. It is amazing. Waxhaw has been very welcoming to our small business. I feel like a small business really jives well with the small town feel here and the people are just so welcoming, so nice. It's a great place to work and live.
Speaker 2:I so get that. So tell our listeners how to find you and how to reach you.
Speaker 3:You can find us at our website, palmettofamilyhearingcom. We have offices in downtown Waxhaw, on South Main Street and in Fort Mill near the Baxter Village area. So we have three audiologists on staff myself, as well as Gary Fike and Adam Nichols three doctors of audiology here on staff, A great, great front desk staff and office manager. So we'd be happy to see you.
Speaker 2:Wonderful. It has been a pleasure chatting with you, dr King, and thank you so much. I look forward to seeing you out in Waxhaw. Thanks for having me on the show, regina, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to GNPSouthCharlottecom. That's GNPSouthCharlottecom, or call 980-351-5719.