Do I need hearing aids?
Most people who could benefit from hearing aids do not yet have them. Studies suggest that only 1 in 5 people who would benefit from hearing aids actually wear them. The average person waits seven years after first noticing hearing difficulty before seeking help. By the time someone arrives at this page, they have usually been noticing something for a while.
Common signs that hearing aids may help you:
- You frequently ask people to repeat themselves, especially in conversations with more than one person
- You struggle to follow conversation in restaurants, social gatherings, or meetings
- You can hear that someone is speaking but cannot always make out the words clearly
- You have turned up the TV or radio to a level others find too loud
- You find phone conversations increasingly difficult
- You have started avoiding social situations you once enjoyed because following conversation has become too effortful
- You notice that women’s and children’s voices are harder to understand than men’s
- You feel unusually tired after social events, a sign your brain is working overtime to fill in what you are missing
The only way to know for certain whether hearing aids will help you is a comprehensive hearing evaluation. The test is painless, takes 45–60 minutes, and gives you a definitive picture of your hearing health. If hearing aids are not needed, we will tell you honestly. If they are, you leave knowing exactly what your options are. There is no commitment beyond the appointment.
One hearing aid or two?
If you have hearing loss in both ears, which is the case for the vast majority of people with age-related or noise-induced hearing loss, two hearing aids are strongly recommended by audiological best practice.
The reasons are functional, not commercial. Hearing with two ears, binaural hearing, is fundamentally different from hearing with one:
- Sound localization: knowing where sounds are coming from requires input from both ears. With only one hearing aid, the brain cannot triangulate sound sources, which affects safety (hearing a car approach) and communication (turning toward the right speaker in a group)
- Speech in noise: binaural processing dramatically improves the brain’s ability to separate a target voice from background noise, a process called the binaural squelch effect. One hearing aid cannot replicate this
- Reduced listening effort: when the brain receives balanced input from both ears, the cognitive load of processing speech is significantly reduced
- Preventing auditory deprivation in the unaided ear: the longer one ear goes without stimulation, the less efficiently it processes sound. This deterioration can become permanent over time
There are specific clinical situations, such as single-sided deafness, where CROS or bone-anchored solutions address asymmetric hearing differently. Your audiologist will advise the right approach for your specific audiogram.
Hearing Aids and Background Noise
Background noise is the single most common complaint among hearing aid users and among the hearing-impaired in general. It is also the area where hearing aid technology has made the most significant advances in recent years.
Modern directional microphone systems, combined with AI-driven noise reduction, can dramatically improve the signal-to-noise ratio: the ratio of the speaker you want to hear against the noise you do not. Premium hearing aids with multi-directional adaptive microphone arrays can automatically detect the primary speaker and reduce competing noise from other directions, making group conversation in restaurants genuinely achievable for many wearers.
For the most challenging situations, such as large boardrooms, loud restaurants, and outdoor events, remote microphone accessories (such as Phonak’s Roger Pen or TableMic) clip onto a lapel or sit on a table and stream the target speaker’s voice directly to your hearing aids, effectively eliminating the distance and noise barrier entirely.
No hearing aid completely eliminates unwanted background noise, and any provider who promises otherwise is overstating the technology. But the best modern devices, properly fitted, make a very significant and often life-changing difference in exactly the situations where people most struggle.
Book an appointment to trial devices in a real-world listening test.