You are looking for a phone charger in your father's guest bathroom and you open the wrong drawer. The hearing aids are in there, in the case they came in, sitting next to a pack of batteries that has never been opened. You do the arithmetic on the way back down the hall. The appointment was in March. It is September.
Nobody hid them. He will tell you exactly where they are if you ask. They are simply not in his ears, and they have not been in his ears for months, and at some point everyone in the family quietly stopped asking about it.
This is a different problem from a parent who has never had their hearing tested. That one is about getting them through the door. This one is stranger and more common: the door was walked through, the money was spent, the devices are in the house — and they are in a drawer.
He already told you why, and the reasons are fixable
Ask and you will get some version of the same four answers. They whistle. Everything is too loud — forks on plates, the refrigerator, his own chewing. They hurt after an hour. And the one underneath the others: he can hear fine in a quiet room, so the problem must be that everyone mumbles.
Here is what matters about that list. Every single item on it is a documented, specific, fixable problem with how a hearing aid was fitted or programmed — not evidence that hearing aids do not work:
- "They whistle." Feedback almost always means the dome or earmold is not sealing. It is a fit problem, and it is usually solved with a different tip size at a follow-up visit that takes half an hour.
- "Everything is too loud." A device that amplifies every frequency equally is set up wrong. Hearing aids are supposed to be programmed to a person's own audiogram — boosting the pitches they have actually lost and leaving the rest alone. An unprogrammed or under-programmed device makes the dishwasher unbearable and speech no clearer, which is the worst of both worlds and exactly the experience that ends in a drawer.
- "They hurt." Discomfort after an hour is also a fit problem. Ear canals change shape with age, and a mold made from an older impression stops fitting.
- "They just stopped working." Before assuming anything expensive, check for wax. A blocked receiver is one of the most common reasons a hearing aid seems to have gone dead, and it is the easiest thing on this list to fix.
None of that is exotic. The reason it does not get fixed is rarely the appointment — it is that the first few weeks with hearing aids are genuinely unpleasant, the world sounds wrong, and going back to say so feels like admitting that a large purchase was a mistake. It is easier to take them out "for now." Then it is September.
What it is costing in the meantime
We have written before about how untreated hearing loss gets mistaken for early dementia — the nodding along at dinner, the answer that lands near the question but not on it. The short version is that the 2024 Lancet Commission on dementia prevention lists hearing loss among fourteen modifiable risk factors, and ranks it, alongside high LDL cholesterol, as one of the two largest arising in mid-life.
What is worth adding here, because it is frequently oversold, is what the treatment evidence actually shows. The ACHIEVE trial followed nearly a thousand adults aged 70 to 84 with untreated hearing loss for three years, giving half of them hearing aids and audiologic care. Across the whole group, the hearing intervention did not slow cognitive decline. In the subgroup already at higher risk of decline, it slowed it by 48%.
So: hearing aids are not a dementia preventive for a healthy seventy-year-old, and anyone telling you otherwise is stretching the data. For an older adult with risk factors already stacking up, the evidence is genuinely striking. And for everyone in between, the honest case for getting the devices out of the drawer has nothing to do with dementia at all — it is that a person who cannot follow a conversation stops joining it, and withdrawal is its own harm, with its own consequences, starting immediately.
The money part, which he may not be volunteering
There may also be a reason your father changed the subject. Hearing aids are expensive and Original Medicare does not cover them.
Part A and Part B do not pay for hearing aids or the exams to fit them. Part B does cover a diagnostic hearing test when a physician orders it to evaluate a medical problem — but a routine test for the purpose of buying hearing aids is not covered. Many Medicare Advantage plans include some hearing benefit, and the amount varies enormously between plans, which means the answer is in his plan documents rather than in anything anyone can tell you in general.
Since October 2022 there has been a second path worth knowing about. The FDA established a category of over-the-counter hearing aids that adults can buy directly in a store or online, without an exam, a prescription, or a professional fitting. They are intended for adults with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss. They are not appropriate for more severe loss, and there are specific signs — ear pain, drainage, sudden or one-sided hearing loss, vertigo — that mean someone should see a physician instead of buying a device off a shelf.
For a family staring at a drawer, the useful context is this: according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, fewer than one in three adults 70 and older who could benefit from hearing aids has ever used them. Your father is not being stubborn in some unusual way. He is the normal case.
Five things to find out before you do anything
This does not call for a confrontation. It calls for information nobody currently has:
- When was his hearing actually measured? Not when he got the aids — when the audiogram was done. If that was several years ago, the devices may be programmed for hearing he no longer has.
- Who fitted them, and was there ever a follow-up? A first fitting is a starting point, not a finished job. A great many people never go back for the adjustment that would have made the difference.
- Which complaint is the actual dealbreaker? Whistling, loudness, and pain are three different problems with three different fixes. "They don't work" cannot be acted on. "They whistle when I chew" can.
- Has anyone looked in his ears? Wax is common, routinely underestimated, and accounts for more sudden changes than families expect.
- What does his plan actually cover? If he is on Medicare Advantage there may be a hearing benefit sitting unused in a document nobody has opened.
Write the answers down and bring them. That page is the difference between an appointment that fixes this and an appointment that ends with the aids going back in the drawer.
Where daily help changes the picture
Most of what is on that list is not medical work. It is attention — noticing that the case has not moved all week, that the batteries are still sealed, that he has drifted back to the end of the table at dinner. That gets done reliably when someone is in the home on a schedule, and sporadically when it depends on an adult child happening to open the wrong drawer.
CarePali provides non-medical, in-home daily-living care across the Westside of Los Angeles and coastal Ventura — help with mornings and evenings, bathing, meals, mobility, and the steady day-to-day observation that turns a quiet withdrawal into something a clinician can look at. We do not diagnose and we do not treat. We notice, we write it down, and we make sure the family hears about it while it is still small. Putting the hearing aids in as part of the morning, checking they are charged, and mentioning that they came out again on Tuesday is exactly the sort of ordinary, unglamorous help that keeps someone in their own conversations.
If the withdrawal has gone further than the dinner table, memory and dementia care covers what that support looks like, and our services page lists what daily care includes.
One question, this week
You do not have to relitigate whether he is hard of hearing. That argument has already been had and it went nowhere. Ask something smaller and far easier to answer: what is the one thing about them that bothers you most?
Then take that single specific answer back to whoever fitted them. The hearing aids in that drawer are not proof that hearing aids do not work. They are proof that these particular ones were never finished.
For plain-language background, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders publishes material for families on age-related hearing loss and on over-the-counter hearing aids, including the warning signs that mean someone should see a physician first. Medicare's coverage rules are on medicare.gov, and the ACHIEVE trial results are published here. None of these replaces a conversation with your parent's own clinician.
If you are trying to sort out what daily help would actually look like in your parent's home, we can walk you through it. Call (310) 818-3217, email reach@carepali.com, or start care here.
