[Hearing training, hearing therapy and auditory rehabilitation in hearing impaired individuals during the last few centuries].

BACKGROUND: The remarkable quality of modern hearing aids enables most hearing impaired individuals to take part in verbal communication without great effort. As a result, auditory training seems to have fallen into oblivion, even though its use is certainly still justified today. This article aims to review the development of these diverse therapy methods.
METHODS: For this systematic review, a selective literature research in PubMed using the keywords "auditory training" = 211 hits and "auditory rehabilitation" = 166 hits has been carried out. In addition, handbooks and monographs were taken into consideration.
RESULTS: For around 2,000 years, people have tried to restore hearing by acoustic stimulation. Initially it was believed that hearing could be "woken up" by means of acoustic stimulation. From the 19th Century onwards, auditory training was meant to support residual hearing and help understanding in verbal communication. Towards the end of the 20th Century, systematic approaches that were intended to enhance cognitive skills, such as concentration and attentiveness by acoustic stimulation, were developed. DISCUSSION: The wish to integrate deaf individuals into the auditory verbal oriented society, the tremendous number of soldiers suffering from noise-induced hearing loss after World War II, modern hearing aids and cochlear implants, and finally availability of personal computers has fostered the development of auditory training methods. Further research has to investigate whether auditory training combined with drug therapy or other stimulation methods are beneficial.