My audiologist has one particular tell — he adjusts his glasses right before saying something about my hearing health he knows I won't like.
Quick disclosure before anything else: this post has a few affiliate links in it. If you click through and buy something, I get a small commission, at no extra cost to you. I only mention hearing supplements I've actually taken myself, alongside my hearing aids, because I'm the one who has to live with whether they work.
He'd just told me, flatly, that 'age is age' — his answer to my question about natural support and whether something like Audifort might help close the gap my hearing aids weren't quite closing. He didn't think it was dangerous. He just didn't think it was necessary. Thirty years of standing in echoing school hallways teaches you that getting older doesn't mean settling for the standard answer, at least not without asking what else there is.
The Cost of Nodding Along
For years I did what my family calls the nod-and-lean — tilt the head, smile, guess at what somebody just said, hope it wasn't a question. It's exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with the ears themselves.
The bigger cost showed up at family dinners, when my granddaughter would lean in to tell me something — one of those little-kid secrets — and the dishwasher and the heater would gang up and swallow the whole sentence. I'd see her mouth moving. I'd see her eyes waiting for my reaction. And I'd have nothing.
That kind of moment does something to a person that a hearing test doesn't measure. You start feeling like a spectator at your own dinner table, which is its own quiet weight to carry. If you've ever sat through a phone call feeling wrung out afterward for no clear reason, I wrote a little more about that side of things in Why Are Phone Calls So Exhausting When You Have Hearing Loss?. It's a fatigue that doesn't show up on any chart.
My Hearing Aids Do Their Job — They Just Don't Do Everything
My hearing aids do their job, no argument there. What they don't touch is the inside — how my brain sorts through noise once the sound actually arrives. That's a different kind of problem, and it's not one more volume can fix.
Whether the supplement and the aids are actually working together, or just happen to overlap without much interaction, is a longer question than I can settle here — and it's a different one from the aids-versus-supplements debate people love to argue about. All I wanted was to support the auditory system from the inside, instead of just turning a dial from the outside.
What Changed Over Four Weeks
Before any of this, I'd already tried the obvious fix — switching my phone to the loudest ringtone it offered, positive that would solve the missed-calls problem. It didn't. I still missed calls, sitting right there in the room, phone buzzing away while I stayed oblivious until I noticed the notification later.
So I started keeping a logbook instead — a habit left over from decades of tracking whether some new classroom policy was actually working or just sounded good on paper. Every Sunday night, coffee in hand, I'd rate the week: Tuesday dinner, hard, background noise won. Thursday phone call, easier, didn't ask 'what' once. Saturday grocery run, moderate, the cashier mumbled.
I started taking Audifort about a month ago, on top of the hearing aids I already wear every day. It wasn't the cheapest thing on the shelf, but it wasn't going to wreck the budget either, and the ingredient list made enough sense to me that I figured it deserved a real trial instead of a skeptical shrug.
Four weeks in, my log had more 'easier' marks than 'hard' ones, which hadn't happened before. Nothing dramatic — no sudden hearing every leaf falling in the yard — just fewer nights where I came away feeling wrung out from straining.
This wasn't the first stretch I've tracked that closely — I did a longer version of it a while back, written up in TV Volume Test: How I Tracked 120 Days of Audifort, if you want the full play-by-play.
That same week, my wife and I were running errands at Derby Street Shoppes in Hingham on a blustery Saturday, wind cutting across the lot and a delivery truck idling outside one of the shops, and I realized I'd followed her whole sentence about the dry cleaning without once asking her to repeat it. Small thing. Also not nothing.
A few days later, I was two aisles into the cereal section at Stop & Shop when my wife started saying my name from the next aisle over — and I'd already turned around before she finished the second syllable, out of habit more than effort.
The bigger test came at a colleague's retirement dinner, in a restaurant with hard floors and high ceilings — the kind of room that usually flattens me by the time the entrées arrive. I didn't spend the whole night just watching lips move for once, and that was worth noting in the log too.
My Friend's Ringing Ears Are a Different Problem Than Mine
A friend of mine spends every free hour between May and October elbow-deep in his backyard vegetable garden, which is where most of our conversations happen these days. His trouble isn't clarity in a crowded room — it's a ringing that doesn't let up, especially in the evenings.
He tried Quietum Plus for it, and says it's given him more quiet than he's had in years — a different win than the one I'm chasing. I ended up trying that same combination for a stretch myself, and wrote the longer version of it in I Missed My Granddaughter's First Sentence: My 14-Week Journey with Quietum Plus and Audifort.
Track the Small Wins, Not Just the Big Ones
Here is the thing: nobody hands you a diploma for advocating for your own ears. If I'd taken that eye-roll at face value and let it be the last word, I'd still be doing the nod-and-lean at every dinner, guessing at punchlines and hoping for the best.
I still struggle in a loud sports bar, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise — no bottle has fixed that yet. But between the hearing aids, the logbook, and Audifort, I've got more good nights than bad ones lately, and that's the only scoreboard that matters to me at this stage.
Talk to your own audiologist. Get your tests done. Ask the 'what else' question anyway, even if you get an eye-roll back for it. And whatever you decide to try, keep a log of the specific stuff — restaurants, phone calls, family dinners — instead of trusting a vague feeling about whether it's working, because a vague feeling forgets, and a page of Sunday-night notes doesn't.