Hearing aids benefit, to varying degrees, people who are hard-of-hearing (HOH) and profoundly deaf (people who can hear something but not enough to understand speech by hearing alone). Nevertheless, several people do not use hearing aids either temporarily or permanently, due to various reasons.

This document offers an highly informal collection of reasons not to use hearing aids either temporarily or permanently, which were made by adult people.

• Some people have the recruitment problem. If the volume is set too low, one hears nothing. If the volume is set too high, then once in a while there is a painful noise spike.
• Hearing aids do not help profundly deaf persons to understand speech, and some of those profoundly deaf persons prefer silence to meaningless environmental noises.
• Some hearing aid users have to remove their hearing aids when they have a cold, otherwise they would suffer not only the pain due to strange noise in the ears but also the painful inflammation in the Eustachian tubes due to the cold.