Stalking the wild remedy...and sometimes me
Note: this page is not completed. You are welcome to stick around and read it, but do not cite, quote, or link to it until this notice goes away. Thank you kindly.
From time to time, people do write to me to ask about
something that is supposed to make them (or their family
member) able to hear again, things like herbal remedies,
acupuncture, and so on, or about cochlear implants. For
the record, I am not aware of any evidence that these
alternative health therapies can restore or maintain
hearing any better than 10 ounces of Kool-aid and turning
three times clockwise while reciting the names of
Santa’s reindeer. Sure, “x%” of people
using that remedy have no further deterioration in their
hearing, but you likely see the same average results
among people who do nothing.
Cochlear implants, on the other hand, have some merit in terms of specific performance. Before I can talk further about that, I need to address the basis of me talking about cochlear implants. For the benefit of those people who have never heard of me, you can skip this part and go to the links at the end, or read this for background.
People seem to love to spread the rumour that I am vehemently anti-implant, that my mission in life, as it were, is to prevent other people from getting them. I don’t know why it serves anyone’s purpose to share my opinion in the first place. Why can they not just share their own opinions? If I may digress for a moment (hey, it’s my site) I have noticed that usually, the representation serves to portray my opinion as extreme or intrusive to the point of stupidity. Like every other nutty conspiracy theory, you have to ask yourself, how does it advance the personal or collective agenda of the people spreading these opinions I allegedly have? Conspiracy theories usually identify someone or something as the monster responsible for adversity and suffering. In this case, deafened people are told that I am trying to obstruct their access to implants, the thing that will allegedly make them whole again. Ergo, they can blame their deafness on me. Think about it: why on earth should I care if anyone else has an implant? As site visitors who have read much of this content already know, I scrupulously avoid giving advice, and I think I take pains to emphasize that your decision must be made by you. It should not be based on emulating me any more than it should be based on mindlessly taking one relative’s advice, one teacher’s advice, one professional’s advice, etc. Just going by the laws of probability, I don’t think everyone should have an implant, because it isn’t right for everyone. I don’t have any specific opinion on who it is and is not right for.
Here are things that I have said:
 | I don’t want to be proselytized by implantees. Just as I don’t know who a CI is right for, they don’t know a CI is right for me. What do they really know about me? They never seem to ask me anything about myself before launching into the “you should” speech. |
| The surgery is not a walk in the park. It is a hole in the skull. Granted, I was raving keen for a caesarian, and you can chop my arm off if you give me general anaesthetic. People are lining up to have their corneas sushi’d off while fully awake, just to get out of wearing glasses, so there are discrepancies in the standards we use when we roll the surgical dice. |
| I hate to see people choosing a CI in desperation without considering all of the options and verifying that they can survive—psychologically and otherwise— if the procedure is a total failure. It is not statistically possible for everyone to be at the top 5% of the bell curve. Someone has to fail. It would be less traumatic to fail if one had other options for getting by, communicating in the family at least. |
| Even without hearing, I am a capable, complete, and worthy person. Deafness is not a life-threatening disability. I acknowledge that it may be a lifestyle-threatening disability. However, the CI may not be sufficient to change that. |
| Given that deafness is not life-threatening, I have had some difficulty with parental decisions on behalf of minor children, particularly infants, but I have conceded that the decision presently belongs to the parents, and parents make difficult and even contentious decisions related to their children all the time, not all of which can ever be validated as the right or wrong decision. |
| Given the propensity for children to exercise their independence at the earliest opportunity, I would personally prefer not to pay through my taxes for the implantation of children who subsequently choose to implant it in their sock drawer. It’s not like I have the power to exercise my preference, but I am entitled to have it. |
| Hearing adults who become deaf are not entitled to give an expert opinion on implantation of children. They are entitled to any adult’s opinion, for what that is worth, but their experience of late-deafness with or without implantation is different in almost every way from the child who is born deaf. They also are ordinarily not qualified to speak about the quality or worth of paediatric implant programs, rehabilitation prospects, educational outlook, etc. related to children. |
| Growing up hard of hearing, I feel somewhat informed about what an implanted child could experience with the partial hearing that the implant could provide. I would hate to see a child repeat my experience of social isolation. While I appreciate the educational advantages I had, I regret that I did not have any opportunity to meet deaf peers instead of mere contemporaries, hearing children who came up with every possible explanation for my social inadequacy except for the hearing loss that I was intensively trained to make invisible to them. |
| The implant and implantation, even of children, is incapable of “deaf genocide” because it does not make the person hearing. The parents may mistakenly believe the child becomes hearing, but like children educated orally, the children eventually will figure out that they are not. The only thing about implants that could harm Deaf culture is an exclusionary, “deafer than thou” attitude of its gatekeepers. Deaf diversity will save the culture, while the “not deaf enough” attitude will hurt it. If people with implants are shunned at the deaf club, they will find another place that accepts them, and deaf club memberships will dwindle, but this cannot be blamed on the implant alone or primarily. If the Deaf culture took the attitude that deaf people with implants were still deaf, that Deaf culture has something to offer deaf people no matter what type of hearing aid they used, then the implant would be a cultural non-issue. |
In the spirit of disclosure, I did get an implant. I remain disgruntled about the circumstances of the decision, and that may never go away. I was probably the angriest candidate ever to inhale anaesthetic. At the same time, I am impressed with it and I find it “cool” as a piece of technology. For various reasons, discussed elsewhere, I use it more of the time than I had expected. I had satisfactory interaction with the clinical team. I have had both specific success and adverse surgical outcome, and aside from the latter, I have got the performance I wanted from the procedure. I am a little less petrified by hearing people. I did enjoy some improvements in my vocational quality of life.
Implant related items on this site:
The search for a cure: about the desperation and exploitation of people desperate for a cure. |
