Making hearing loss a mainstream issue has become my major occupation. Every day people walk into our hearing clinic who have put off hearing aids for so long that mental health and relationship side effects are obvious. How did this happen? Why is it that doctors are still telling people “to wait until your hearing’s worse”? What are they thinking – don’t they read scientific literature?

Let’s be clear. You need to do something about hearing loss as soon as you find that you are having diffiuculty hearing. You need to get really good quality hearing aids as soon as possible – lead the trend – ans ue them most of the time.  Your brain needs those missing frequencies, or it will forget how to do all the coding.

The traditional hearing test is a menace,  It doesn’t really answer the question off why you can’t hear well in noise, and it can give people a false sense of security or defense against the person who badgered you to seek help.

But if you can’t hear in certain situations and other people can, then you have a hearing problem of some kind and you need to act. Top quality  of course. I recommend Blamey Saunders hears.  We rate our hearing aids very, very highly. Quality hearing aids will probabaly help, and the sooner the better (don’t even think about paying $10,000 unless you have money to burn),  Research shows that hearing nerves that are unstimulated die off at about 1% per year. It’s not surprising. It’s like not using a limb. You expect to find some difficulties if you don’t use an arm for 10 years. Hearing loss sneaks up on us because we lose the “treble” first. We don’t notice a change in volume, you notice that it’s hard to hear in difficult conditions. That’s because there is an increasing amount of your hearing missing, and the first signs are when it’s hard to sometimes hear. But people try and get by. One of the consequences is so called “selective hearing”. It’s just too much work to concentrate hard enough to make up for the missing clarity. Solution – get good hearing aids.
Let’s recap:
When you start getting hearing difficulties, you will still hear a lot of things quite loud enough, but it will sound less sharp or clear. Gradually, perhaps so gradually that you don’t notice, the treble is disappearing from your hearing. Do something. When you first start to use hearing aids, you’ll notice some interesting things. You will notice that this autumn, the leaves are crunchier than you remember.

So, why the scary title?  Because the scientific literature gets daily stronger, about the association between even mild untreated hearing loss and dementia. Me, I’m not risking that one, and I (mostly) wear my hearing aids.