Can a Hearing Aid Restore Hearing Completely?

At least 10% of a population experiences hearing loss. The good news is that most people who experience hearing loss will be able to benefit enormously from wearing hearing aids. One question to think about, though, is will hearing aids restore your hearing completely? The short answer is that no, a hearing won’t be able to fully restore your hearing or be a ‘cure’ for hearing loss. However, wearing a hearing aid is something that will go a long way to being able to restore normal hearing levels for a range of different things that you might have been missing out on hearing well before. 

Using hearing aids to help your hearing loss is a treatment that does work and does show vast improvements. Much like you would wear glasses if you need help to see, hearing aids help to support some normal, or at least near-normal hearing function. For someone who experiences hearing loss, wearing hearing aids will help improve sounds around you, as well as help you understand conversational speech. They can go a long way to help you to feel more comfortable in your everyday surroundings. Like anything designed to improve your life, you need to make sure that you are using the best-suited device to your needs, requirements and lifestyle. 

Wearing hearing aids can also take time to adjust to, and your hearing instrument specialist is likely to not put hearing aids at 100% level, especially if you have experienced hearing loss for a while and are now only doing something about it. 

How do hearing aids work?

Put simply, hearing aids work as an amplifier for sound. When you experience hearing loss, in many instances, the small hair cells in your ear canal that transfer sounds to your brain stop functioning as they should. The hearing aid picks up any external sound through a microphone, making the sounds louder and clearer. This helps any healthy hair cells that remain to be able to transmit the sounds to the brain, as it would do without hearing loss. 

There are so many great technological advances with hearing aids so that they can work for a number of people and can be much more sensitive. Hearing aids, depending on which you choose, can also have a number of features, such as volume increase and blocking out background noise, to make sure that you get your hearing levels with hearing aids, just as you want, and restored as much as possible. 

Why can’t hearing aids restore my hearing completely?

Hearing aids can’t restore hearing completely or heal or cure your hearing loss. But why can’t they? Hearing aids are able to restore the sound and volume level that you hear to a normal level, but the fact of the matter is that making sounds louder doesn’t always give the brain all of the information that it needs to process the sound. 

Our brains are used to getting sound signals in certain ways that then trigger different neurological responses. The sounds have to be intelligible to the brain in order to be differentiated. When you have hearing loss, it reduces how well you can hear, but it can also distort the sounds you hear. By only amplifying sounds, it doesn’t always solve the problem of lost hearing completely.

Getting the most from your hearing aids is something that can take time and be a learning process, almost like your brain learning a new language. When you haven’t heard something for a long time, you may find those sounds hard to process at first, but this will improve over time. Working with a hearing instrument specialist and taking time to see what works best for you with hearing aids having the power to transform your life. Your daily life can improve when you use them, and social interactions can be much easier with hearing aids, as they get hearing back to as normal of a hearing level as possible. 

Getting the most out of your hearing aid

If you want to get the most out of hearing aids, then they do need to be worn daily. If you are having some problems with your devices or your hearing, or something isn’t quite right, then it is best to get in touch with us today. At Center for Better Hearing, we’re here to help, so give us a call at 510-768-7091 to find out more.