2021 Readers’ Choice Awards Audiologist winner: Rebecca Berger, AU.D. wins 5th year
“I’m really lucky. I am one of the few people I know that gets to do a job that they love. It’s amazing.”
— Rebecca Berger
MARSHALL COUNTY — Rebecca Berger, AU.D. Doctor of Audiology celebrated her fifth year winning
the 2021 Readers’ Choice Awards for best audiologist in Marshall County. Berger holds a Doctorate Degree in Audiology which qualifies her to treat patients clinically. Some professionals go on to obtain a PH.D to conduct research, but her passion was serving people. “I really, really love working with people.”
Patients are referred to her from local physicians for balance testing and hearing loss evaluation. Walk-ins are also welcome.
Audiology is a medical practice and differs from a hearing aid dispensary. A dispenser’s license focuses on enough testing to be fitted for hearing aids. “I’m going to do a much more detailed test that gives them a lot more information than a dispenser would.” Berger conducts diagnostic testing. Berger determines if the hearing loss is medically treatable. “When I’m doing a hearing test I’m determining if it’s a medically treatable hearing loss. Sometimes it’s not. More often than not it’s not medically treatable.”
In those cases the hearing loss is treated with hearing aids. Berger offers that service in her office. Hearing aid sales are her favorite part of the job. “It is so fun to be able to put hearing aids on somebody and their whole world changes. That doesn’t happen every time. Hearing aids are a long way from perfect. But it’s a really rewarding job. I love it.”
Berger also conducts balance testing. Before opening her own practice she worked for an ear, nose and throat (ENT) specialist. “The most typical type of balance testing I can test for and treat.”
She performs ear wax removal. “Some patients don’t have hearing loss but need their ears cleaned. They build up enough wax that over time they need it removed.”
There is also a cognitive component to hearing. “we can make things loud enough. When I do the hearing test, I not only test tones and how loud things have to be, but we also test to see how clearly speech is understood.”
With that test, the volume of the words are turned up enough to compensate for the hearing loss and the patient repeats the words back as they heard them and understood them. “The words are balanced according to how often all the sounds occur in our language. It’s all very scientific. But basically that score on that test in my mind is the most important part of the test. We can fix the loudness issue with hearing aids. We can’t fix how that information is being processed.”
“If I put someone in the test booth and they are in this really quiet situation and there is no interference and they still can’t understand the words even though they are loud enough, they are having a processing problem because there is damage in that auditory system.”
Berger said that often those individuals are frustrated with their hearing aids. “They spend all this money and they still can’t hear when there is a bunch of stuff going on and there is a bunch of noise because that’s a really difficult listening test. That’s a difficult processing task. If you don’t process well in quiet then you certainly won’t process well in noise.”
When the auditory system is damaged, hearing aids can amplify the sound but cannot change the way that the sound is being heard or how it is being comprehended. “So the issue for those people is — yes, they may hear those sounds. But they don’t hear them the same way that they used to because it’s being heard through a damaged auditory system.”
For musicians, unresolvable hearing loss can be traumatic. “I have some patients with hearing loss that are musicians. It’s kind of devastating to them. Because hearing aids can’t fix everything. Hearing aids are basically amplifiers and they are sophisticated amplifiers. But they can’t fix all of the things that the brain does when you have normal hearing.”
Her office is located at 2930 Miller Drive, Plymouth. Contact Berger by calling 574-935HEAR (4327) or email her at bergeraudiology@outlook.com. Find out more about services offered at bergeraudiology.com.