Your Hearing Loss Isn’t Just in Your Ears

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]One of the biggest misconceptions about hearing loss is it just affects your ears. It just affects your ability to hear what's being said. And that's not true. It's affecting your brain. Your brain is like a muscle and like any other muscle in your body, if you don't use it, you lose it. And so when you have an untreated hearing loss and your brain is not getting stimulated by certain sounds because your ears can no longer hear it, your brain stops being able to understand or comprehend those sounds. So when patients come into the office and we do a hearing test, a basic basic hearing test, you push the button when you hear the beeps and you repeat back some words in quiet. If you're going to someone who's doing best practices, they're also going to do some speech and noise testing. But what we're doing with this testing is of course when you press the button for the beeps, we're looking at how well can your ears collect the sound. How well can you hear?

[00:00:54]Then we have you repeat back words in quiet and repeat back sentences in noise because we're now looking at, well, if we make our voice loud enough to correct for any hearing loss you might have, can you now understand what's being said? Because we don't really hear with our ears. We hear with our brain. Our brain has to interpret everything the ears send it. And when you have a long time, a prolonged period of untreated hearing loss, your brain begins to stop being able to understand what the ears are sending it. So please do not wait to treat your hearing loss. Just like any other ailment in your body, the longer you wait to treat it, the more difficult it is to treat. Please, please, please reach out, find an audiologist in your area that is following best practices.

[00:01:38]All right, friends, have a great day.

[00:01:39]Bye-bye.