The Morning Meeting with Al Tompkins is a daily Poynter briefing of story ideas worth considering and other timely context for journalists, written by senior faculty Al Tompkins.
The law that would allow the sale of hearing aids over the counter passed in 2017 but it took effect just this week. Before now, hearing aids might cost a person thousands of dollars but now you can buy them at CVS or Walmart for $199-$999 a pair. (Walmart is offering them initially in Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas with a national rollout soon.) CVS’s hearing aides are available to anyone online.
Over the counter means you will have to fit them yourself. And the government warned that some devices for sale might not look like conventional hearing aids and are not meant for adults or people with severe hearing problems. Think of them more like the reading glasses you buy at the drugstore.
The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders explained:
Hearing loss significantly affects quality of life for tens of millions of adults in the United States and contributes to high health care costs. Untreated hearing loss can lead to isolation, and it has been associated with serious conditions such as depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, dementia, reduced mobility, and falls. Yet only one in four adults who could benefit from hearing aids has ever used them. Making hearing health care more accessible and affordable is a public health priority, especially as the number of older adults in the U.S. continues to grow.
A law established as part of the FDA Reauthorization Act of 2017 directed the FDA to create a category of OTC hearing aids for adults with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss. As part of this process, in October 2021, the FDA formally proposed a rule to establish the new OTC hearing aids category. Finalized in August 2022, the final rule allows hearing aids within this category to be sold directly to consumers in stores or online without a medical exam or a fitting by an audiologist. Hearing aids for more severe hearing loss or for users younger than age 18 remain prescription devices.
The competition for this new business will be fierce. Sony, for example, has self-fitting hearing aids selling through Best Buy for $999 or more. One device looks something like an earbud and the other is significantly smaller. Sony said in a release that the customer will use an app to customize the devices to their needs:
While each device features an easy-to-navigate app interface with customizable options for the wearer’s specific hearing needs and preferences, the two models coming to market will provide more choice when it comes to the look and capabilities of high-end hearing devices.
Sony says that more than 65% of the total U.S. consumer market that needs better hearing care has not received it.
Other big names already in the over-the-counter hearing aid space include Bose.
Some facts about adult deafness from The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders:
- Approximately 15% of American adults (37.5 million) aged 18 and over report some trouble hearing.
- Men are almost twice as likely as women to have hearing loss among adults aged 20-69.
- Non-Hispanic white adults are more likely than adults in other racial/ethnic groups to have hearing loss; non-Hispanic black adults have the lowest prevalence of hearing loss among adults aged 20-69.
- About 18 percent of adults aged 20-69 have speech-frequency hearing loss in both ears from among those who report 5 or more years of exposure to very loud noise at work, as compared to 5.5 percent of adults with speech-frequency hearing loss in both ears who report no occupational noise exposure.
- One in eight people in the United States (13 percent, or 30 million) aged 12 years or older has hearing loss in both ears, based on standard hearing examinations.
- About 2 percent of adults aged 45 to 54 have disabling hearing loss. The rate increases to 8.5 percent for adults aged 55 to 64. Nearly 25 percent of those aged 65 to 74 and 50 percent of those who are 75 and older have disabling hearing loss.
- Roughly 10 percent of the U.S. adult population, or about 25 million Americans, has experienced tinnitus lasting at least five minutes in the past year.
- About 28.8 million U.S. adults could benefit from using hearing aids.
- Among adults aged 70 and older with hearing loss who could benefit from hearing aids, fewer than one in three (30 percent) has ever used them. Even fewer adults aged 20 to 69 (approximately 16 percent) who could benefit from wearing hearing aids have ever used them.
I imagine that there will be a lot of junk over-the-counter hearing aids for sale, a great area for you consumer reporter journalists to investigate.
Interestingly, in the most recent survey of adults 20-69, the overall annual prevalence of hearing loss dropped slightly from 16 percent in the period from 1999 to 2004 to 14 percent from 2011 to 2012. I was pretty sure that listening to loud music in the ’70s would add to hearing aid sales.
My unscientific research also shows that 79% of wives believe their husbands are hearing impaired. And 100% of the people I am married to want to take a trip to Walmart’s hearing kiosk this week.
Recession now “almost certain,” according to Bloomberg model
The last time we checked in with Bloomberg’s “recession probability” model, the forecast was for a 65% chance of a recession. Now it is 100%.
The latest recession probability models by Bloomberg economists Anna Wong and Eliza Winger forecast a higher recession probability across all timeframes, with the 12-month estimate of a downturn by October 2023 hitting 100%, up from 65% for the comparable period in the previous update.
Packed airplanes and cruise ships are on a collision course with COVID
The Transportation Security Administration says the number of people who passed through TSA airport checkpoints Sunday was the highest daily figure since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Signs point to a surge in Europe, which could foretell another winter wave in the United States. Cases rose by 104 percent in Portugal and 42 percent in Switzerland over the past week, while the virus has also surged in Germany, France, Italy and Austria, according to The Washington Post’s coronavirus tracker.
The World Health Organization and European Center for Disease Prevention and Control warned Wednesday that the continent is probably entering a new covid wave, which will coincide with a resurgence in the flu. In the ECDC’s latest weekly report, it noted “widespread increases were being observed in all indicators,” including cases, hospitalizations and deaths across the continent.
Covid cases are also up in parts of Asia, including South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, which have dropped most of their travel restrictions in recent months. In Singapore, which has seen a 44 percent increase in the average number of daily reported cases over the past week, the Ministry of Health said Saturday that an omicron subvariant known as XBB jumped from a 22 percent share of local cases to 54 percent over the course of a week.
Physicians say “Call me ‘Doctor’”
I don’t know about you, but when I speak to my physicians and dentist, I call them “doctor.” I know them all personally, and away from the office they are Dylan, Rina and John. Among the findings of a new survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association are:
- Female physicians had more than twice the odds as men to be called by their first name
- Physicians holding a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO) degree had nearly twice the odds and primary care physicians had approximately 50% greater odds of being called by their first name.
- Female patients are less likely to call a physician by their first name
- The age of the physician did not seem to influence how the patient addressed them.
The practice of minimizing another person’s official position is called “untitling.” Close to two-thirds of physicians surveyed in 2000 said they found the informality annoying and The Washington Post talked with experts who said overfamiliarity has the potential to undermine their medical authority and “using a first name can violate the boundary between doctor and patient.”
Not long ago, Fast Company ran a piece that examined the “untitling” movement:
Untitling happens repeatedly to women with professional titles, such as doctors (medical, research, and professional), professors, clergy, government officials, military personnel, and coaches. Recent research of 321 speaker introductions found that when female physicians introduced other physicians they almost always used their “doctor” titles (for 95% of male doctors and 97.8% of female doctors). However, male physicians introduced other male physicians as “doctor” in 72.4% of the cases, but only 49.2% of the time when introducing female physicians.
The Fast Company article continued:
Even women in the military may find themselves untitled, according to Dr. David Smith, a sociology professor at the U.S. Naval War College and coauthor of Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace. Military titles are typically forgotten and unacknowledged when the women are not in uniform, while their male counterparts in civilian clothes are addressed appropriately.
Why do some people seem to attract mosquitoes?
My wife and son are like walking pest strips. Mosquitoes seem to love them and now we are finding out why. It could be the critters are attracted by certain smells.
Composting grandma
Maybe being buried in a gleaming steel casket is not your style or cremation is too creepy. Well, how would you feel about a real dust-to-dust kind of thing, where they compost you when you cash in your earthly chips? Washington State was the first to allow human composting, now five states allow it and others are considering it. One business that offers the service describes it as “gently transforming human remains into soil.”
Micah Truman, CEO of Return Home, a Auburn, Washington, company that composts human remains into soil, holds soil made with animal remains that is used to show what the product of their process looks like. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
Watch a video and learn a new phrase: “terramation.” It means human composting. Another phrase used to describe the process is “natural organic reduction.”
Bernard Wolfson writes for Kaiser Health News:
Human composting doesn’t mean you’re tossed into a bin with potato peels, crushed eggshells, and coffee grounds. Rather, you’d be placed in a metal or wooden vessel, enveloped by organic materials such as wood chips, alfalfa, and straw, and then slowly reduced to a nutrient-packed soil. The process can take six weeks to six months depending on the methods used.
California becomes the fifth state to allow this method of body disposal, commonly known by the more scientific-sounding name “natural organic reduction.” Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington have legalized the practice, and legislation is pending in several other states.
One naturally reduced human body can yield anywhere from 250 to 1,000 pounds of soil depending on the method used and the type and volume of organic materials mixed with the body. That’s enough to fill several wheelbarrows or the bed of a pickup. Once the process is complete, many families take a small box of the soil and donate the rest to conservation projects or flower farms.
The composted soil must only be used on private farms or gardens, not scattered here and there.
The Catholic News Agency says the California Catholic Conference objects to the new law saying it “reduce(s) the human body to a disposable commodity, and we should instead seek options that uphold respect for both our natural world and the dignity of the deceased person.”
Kathleen Domingo, executive director of the California Catholic Conference, said the use of a body composting method originally developed for farm animals creates an “unfortunate spiritual, emotional, and psychological distancing from the deceased.” In addition, she said, the process “reduces the human body to simply a disposable commodity.”
The Catholic Church does not have an official teaching on the composting of human bodies but has weighed in many times over the years on the practice of cremation. While strongly discouraged, cremation can be permissible under certain restrictions; notably, the remains are not to be scattered and must be kept in a sacred place, out of reverence for the Church’s teaching on the eventual resurrection of the body.
“We believe that the ‘transformation’ of the remains would create an emotional distance rather than a reverence for them,” Steve Pehanich, a spokesperson for the California Catholic Conference, told Religion News Service in 2020.
“Even with cremated remains, they directed that they remain in a communal place befitting of the dignity inherent in the human body and its connection to the immortal soul,” Pehanich said.
Archaeologists believe Neanderthals and humans have been burying their dead for 130,00 years, and in medieval days, farmers grazed their cows on burial plots because, maybe, the grass grew better with all of those decaying nutrients underground. Before 1700, only rich people got coffins, everyone else got wrapped up and laid in the dirt. Sometime in the 1800s the hexagonal coffins were replaced by the more popular rectangular caskets. Some historians say the real move to caskets happened during the Civil War. The first patent for a metal casket was awarded in 1848 to Dr. Almond Dunbar Fisk, who created an airtight metal burial case.
Today, you can buy a coffin through Costco or Walmart. (That is the second time I mentioned Walmart today. They are not sponsors.) You can get a pine box for less than $800. Or you can spend a few thousand dollars and get turned back into dirt. You’ll show your parents, who never thought you would amount to mulch.
