The first time Richard Einhorn noticed his hearing was deteriorating, like many people, was when his phone was stuck and he couldn’t hear what his coworkers were saying. He was 38, which may seem too young to need hearing aids, but it’s actually quite common. What he did next was also quite common. “I ignored it,” Einhorn, now 72, told me. “Hearing loss is an old person thing. Of course I hid it.” He went untreated for seven years.
Approximately 15% of Americans, or about 53 million people, have hearing loss. CDC.but, AARP Survey It turns out that Americans over the age of 40 are more likely to get a colonoscopy than a hearing test. Although hearing starts to decline in people’s 20s, many people see hearing loss as a sign of aging and delay treatment for fear of looking older. According to According to the American Hearing Loss Association, people with hearing loss, like Einhorn, wait an average of seven years before seeking help.
Ignoring your hearing loss increases your risk of social isolation, loneliness, and even dementia. Ironically, one of the best things you can do to avoid feeling old is to get a hearing aid. Over the past two years, these devices have become cheaper and more available than they were before they were FDA approved, and they’re arguably cooler than ever. Approved Last week, Apple proposed turning AirPods into entry-level hearing aids. The new technology is just a first step, rather than a complete solution. Think of them like reading glasses you can buy at the drugstore, rather than prescription lenses. This, rather than the AirPods themselves, may be the key to easing the stigma around hearing aids. Creating an easier, faster entry point to hearing aids could help Americans embrace the idea that hearing loss is a spectrum, and that treatment isn’t necessarily a rite of passage that comes with old age.
As things stand, those who may particularly benefit from destigmatizing hearing aids are: Senior man“Men are more exposed to noise than women, so they’re at higher risk for early hearing loss,” says Steven Rauch, a specialist in hearing and balance disorders at Harvard Medical School. Unlikely Go to the doctor. (Several men I interviewed said their wives had urged them to go to an audiologist.) Instead, many hide their hearing loss by nodding along in conversations, arriving late to social gatherings, or staying home.
Pretending not to hear only makes the situation worse: Untreated, hearing loss leads to social isolation. “You feel stupid when you’re sitting in a room and people are talking and you can’t join in,” says Toni Iacolucci, a communications access advocate who waited 12 years to get a hearing aid. “The energy you expend pretending you can hear is really exhausting.”
Compensating for untreated hearing loss can actually be very taxing and have significant effects on the brain. “Hearing loss is arguably the single greatest risk factor for cognitive decline and dementia,” says Frank Lin, director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Cochlear and Hearing Public Health. Lin and his colleagues: i got you Mild hearing loss doubles the risk of dementia, and moderate hearing loss triples it. In this context, hearing aids seem like a miracle device that slows aging. In the same study, Lin also found that among older adults at high risk of cognitive decline, participants who wore hearing aids for three years experienced about 50% less cognitive decline than the control group.
Lin hypothesizes that this difference is due to cognitive load: “Anyone’s brain can buffer against the pathology of dementia,” he told me, “but if you also have hearing loss, then a lot of that buffering ability has to be used to deal with the hearing loss.”
The gap between onset and treatment often means years of lost conversation and social connection. Loneliness and isolationFor Einhorn, who worked as a composer and classical music record producer, his declining hearing meant he had to constantly strive to look good. He remembers going to restaurants, tilting his head completely to the left to avoid his good ear, and denying to friends that he had a hearing problem. He also began to avoid going to parties and movies. “Phone calls were hellish,” he told me. He eventually had surgery on one ear, and in 2010, he started wearing a hearing aid, but suddenly lost all hearing in one ear. “When I lost my good ear, I fell into an abyss of silence and loneliness,” he says. “It was an existential crisis: figure out how to deal with this, or is it going to be really serious, given the loneliness I’m already experiencing.” It was only then that he realized that the hearing aids were not as noticeable as he had imagined, and that blending into his world was worth the damage to his vanity. Like many people who use hearing aids, he struggles to hear in restaurants and at parties (rooms without carpeting or music), but the hearing aids have made a tremendous difference in his quality of life. He still regrets the years he spent instead listening and not changing his attitude. “When you’re 72, you realize you’ve done a lot of stupid things. Not getting treatment was probably the stupidest thing I’ve done in my life,” he said.
That some people have such a hard time, when solutions exist, shows how powerful ageism and the pressure to appear young can be. As long as people believe they have to choose between hearing well and looking young, many will choose to pretend they can hear. Overcoming the age association may be the final challenge in convincing people to try hearing aids.
Until recently, some of the barriers were more basic. Hearing aids were available only by prescription, and typically required a visit to an audiologist who would fit the aids. Prescription hearing aids also Fee Hearing aids can cost thousands of dollars and may not be covered by insurance. Pete Cousty, for example, went to the doctor several years after he noticed he was singing out of tune while playing in a band, but decided not to buy hearing aids because of the high cost. Instead, he quit his band and his church choir.
But those barriers are lowering. In 2022, the FDA Approved Hearing aids for adults are now available for sale without a prescription, opening up the technology to the industry for the first time. Commercially available products are now on the market, including from brands such as Sony and JLab. Apple’s hearing aid feature, compatible with select AirPod Pros, is the first FDA-approved commercially available hearing aid software device and will be available later this fall through a software update. EssilorLuxottica schedule The company plans to launch its first-ever hearing aid glasses later this year. Learning that over-the-counter hearing aids existed inspired Kuss to address his hearing loss, and getting prescription hearing aids “gave him a huge boost in confidence,” he told me. This year, Kuss has attended four weddings and a Red Rocks concert. He’s also started playing the saxophone again, and plans to return to the stage within a year.
But none of this disproves the link between hearing aids and aging: The selling point of the new AirPod technology is simply that “anyone can wear an AirPod,” says Katherine Bouton, a hearing loss advocate and memoir author. Screaming doesn’t solve anything “The more you see people wearing something, the more normal it becomes,” Iacolucci told me. At the same time, AirPods often signal that a person is listening to music or a podcast, rather than engaging with the world around them. While AirPods may improve a person’s hearing, they don’t necessarily make hearing loss less isolating. Iacolucci believes that even if AirPods could treat hearing loss, they wouldn’t completely eliminate the impact of hearing loss. “I still have to deal with an internalized stigma that’s a thousand times worse,” she told me.
“The real power of Apple’s technology may be in how it targets users with mild to moderate hearing loss. Changing the stigma around hearing loss will take more than gadgets; it will require a change in our understanding of how hearing works.”Hearing loss “That implies it’s dualistic, but that’s far from the truth,” Lin says. Most people don’t lose their hearing overnight. Rather, their hearing starts to decline (along with the rest of their body) as soon as they reach adulthood. Over time, hearing is permanently damaged by going to loud concerts, watching fireworks, or mowing the lawn, and the world is getting louder. By 2060, the number of Americans over the age of 20 with hearing loss will be Expected This is expected to increase by 67%, meaning that around 30 million more people will need treatment. If devices already in use made it easier for people to transition to hearing aids at a younger age, the change in identity might be less pronounced, making hearing aids more mainstream and changing the idea that hearing aids are just for old people.
