Question: is there at anypoint when someone s ears could be badly damaed that earing-aids cant help them?

Hanna Jeffery answered on 4 Mar 2019:

Yes.

I’m probably going to say this a lot this week, but hearing doesn’t just happen in your ears – it happens in your brain! In order to hear, you need good ears but also nerves to send the messages from your ears to your brain.

Hearing aids are only helpful when the person has some hearing. There are some people who do not have any useful hearing.
Some of these people will have a cochlear implant instead. (A cochlear implant is an electric wire which is put into the ear during an operation. The person then wears something like a hearing aid on the outside of their ear, which sends sound to the wire using a magnet). Cochlear implants still need the hearing nerve to work properly, so that sound messages reach the brain. A person can’t have a cochlear implant if:
– the hearing nerve is too badly damaged
– the ears are too badly damaged to have the implant operation
– they are not healthy enough to have any operations

Not everyone wants a cochlear implant – some people learn to lipread and use sign language instead.

There was a project on TV recently (‘the Big Life Fix’) about someone who had no hearing because his hearing nerves were damaged. They made him an app which typed out what people were saying – like real life subtitles. I thought that was brilliant.