House is the home of “ear-oics”

The House Ear Institute in Los Angeles is to hearing-disorder treatment what MD Anderson Center in Houston is to cancer.

I went to House for my second cochlear-implant, a do-over necessitated by problems with my original surgery in Atlanta. My wife and I were bowled over not only by the professionalism and friendliness of the doctors, nurses and staff but also by the fact that HEI spares patients the huge, added expense of an LA hotel stay by offering them housing, if they so desire, in low-cost efficiency apartments in an old nunnery. HEI surgeons operate in a hospital next-door, St. Vincent’s, founded decades ago by the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent De Paul.

HEI is internationally respected but kind of a secret in the USA, owing largely to putting its funding into research, not advertising.

The institute itself, now a private non-profit research and educational facility, was founded in 1946 by Howard House, a pioneering M.D. in the auditory field.  HEI research milestones include:

• First cochlear implant system

• First digital hearing aid

• First auditory brainstem implant

• First functional hearing test (HINT)

• Development of the team approach to Microscopic ear and skull base surgery, including the middle fossa approach and “translabyrinthine” approach to acoustic neuroma removal

          My re-do was as routine as a mole removal compared to some of the remarkably difficult procedures HEI surgeons perform. During my stay there, my wife and I met other patients ranging from a young woman being treated for inner-ear tumors to an Army veteran, deafened by a Vietnam bomb blast, who got his ear rebuilt and his long-lost hearing partially restored.

HEI’s headquarters gleam like Oz, and its wizards are the real deal.

For more about HEI, visit https://hei.org/