Why You Should Treat Bilateral Hearing Loss with Two Hearing Aids

Why You Should Treat Bilateral Hearing Loss with Two Hearing Aids

In Hearing Aids by Dr. Jason Leyendecker

Dr. Jason Leyendecker
Latest posts by Dr. Jason Leyendecker (see all)

If you’ve just discovered you have hearing loss, you might wonder how to choose the right treatment path and find the right hearing aid for your needs. You shouldn’t scrimp on getting hearing aids for both of your ears.

No shortcuts

If you are considering just using one hearing aid instead of two, you should understand its impact on your experience. Most hearing loss is irreversible, and our hearing often declines as we age and our auditory system becomes more delicate. 

Hearing damage cannot be repaired, although its impact can be minimized through hearing devices. There’s no doubt that they are a significant financial investment, and this causes some to consider whether they only need to use one for their ‘bad’ ear. Unfortunately, making do with just one hearing aid will not work as well as people hope. 

Paired hearing aids help perform binaural hearing for us, telling us about the location of sound and helping us distinguish relevant sounds from background noise. One hearing aid can’t do the work of a pair. Additionally, leaving hearing loss untreated erodes the connection between the ear and our brain. Trying to save money by only using a single hearing aid can result in higher costs to your immediate quality of life and your hearing health down the road.  

How hearing works

Just as having two eyes helps us understand where objects are spatial, having two ears lets us understand the origin and direction of the sound. 

Sound, traveling as waves through the air, hits our ears at slightly different moments. If I stand to your left and say “Hello,” my greeting will hit your left ear before it reaches your right ear. Your brain rapidly processes this slight time difference, and you can detect that I am speaking to you from your left side. 

Part of what paired hearing aids do is assist your hearing in helping you localize sound correctly, something a single hearing aid cannot do. By contrast, using just one ear makes interpreting the source of sound much foggier. Without being able to place sounds, it becomes harder to sort out the words of nearby conversation from the environmental noise of a room. It can also limit your ability to assess where sirens, emergency signals, and sounds of possible danger are coming from.

Unilateral Hearing Loss

Sound localization is so vital to our comprehension that it may surprise you that the best treatment for single-sided (unilateral) hearing loss is often a paired hearing device. 

With CROS hearing aids, a microphone device placed in the ear with hearing loss transmits the sound wirelessly to a hearing aid worn in the ‘better’ ear. The transmission replicates the sound lag between ears and helps naturally reformulate the ability to localize sound. 

Bilateral Hearing Loss

When hearing loss is present in both ears, it’s called bilateral hearing loss, and both ears should be involved in its treatment. With paired hearing aids, the device for each side is programmed to the specific hearing needs of the ear it is in to maximize your hearing ability in each ear. 

The latest hearing aids use digital processing to help emphasize localization. This improved access to sound in each ear helps give you a more precise ability to localize sound, creating a sturdier hearing foundation for comprehension. 

Treating both ears for hearing loss is also preventative. Hearing aids help maintain your brain’s processing ability by connecting it to your inner ear. When the connection between the brain and the inner ear is lost or strained, the brain rewrites how it hears sound to compensate for lost sensitivity. The longer hearing loss goes untreated, the less we can return to how the brain’s unimpaired connection to hearing.

Opting for one hearing aid instead of two means letting the hearing in the unaided ear potentially worsen. Hearing with just one ear becomes lopsided as your brain will come to rely on a single ear, and your mind’s connection to your weaker ear can diminish. When it finally comes to the time when you want to switch from a single hearing aid to a pair, you may find the hearing in the ear that had been left un-assisted has deteriorated from disuse. 

Make the right long-term decision

For the above reasons, we can see that purchasing a single hearing aid may look like it saves you money, but it will come to haunt you further down the road. 

Contact us today if you’d like to learn more and keep your hearing at its best. We’re here to help you with all aspects of your hearing health.