Cochlear Implants and the Internet :: Health Disability

On-line communities are something I arrest never participated in. I have always felt (due to personal observations of friends using chat rooms and listening to others renditions of their experiences) these communities can, and most often do, consume inordinate amounts of time and chuck up the sponge time is a rare commodity for me. Beyond the time consumption, from my observations of chat rooms, at that place are rarely any well-thought-out responses to the topic of discussion. In fact, often there are inane and childish retorts that just stir up the emotions of those involved and tend to sidetrack the majority as they rally against the perpetrator. On the other hand, I assume there are places where professionals can have relevant and introspective discussions, but I had never viewed, participated in or even read archived logs of much(prenominal) discourse. I imagine these professional discussions could be highly beneficial interactions for problem solving, as we ll as being supportive while offering positive criticism. Since my specialty is education of the deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HH), I have been exposed to the highly emotionally charged debates on the issue of cochlear implants (CI). I was implicated in finding out how easy (or difficult) it would be for hearing parents with deaf children to receive balanced and unbiased information on cochlear implants. Could they acquire the cognition they would need in order to make informed decisions on behalf of their children on the World Wide Web? For those unfamiliar with CIs, the simplest explanation is to think of it as a high powered hearing aid which is surgically implanted in the recipients head (actually the inner ear) and feeds electrical impulses directly to the brain. It does not play away or alter a persons deafness. When the wait onor is on, the implant stimulates hearing. When it is turned off, the hearing is gone. Maybe a short description of the proce ss would be appropriate to insert here before continuing. First a recess is drilled in the temporal bone of the skull (behind the ear) and a magnetic dish is placed in this well. Connected to this disk is a wireactually a bundle of wires depending on the CIs number of channels or frequencies.