TOTAL DEAFNESS is rare, very rare. Even in schools for the deaf, with the highest concentration of totally deaf, many students use powerful hearing aids with which they get some help. Often those with severe to profound deafness have been incorrectly diagnosed as having total deafness, or at least are of that opinion, perhaps because total deafness is easier to understand than the subtleties of severe or profound loss. In our practice we find new patients who wear just one or no hearing aid because of misdiagnosis. That doesn’t mean we can give normal hearing to the profoundly impaired, but we can often give enough help to make amplification successful, permitting the patient to communicate better. What about actual total deafness? Sometimes we see individuals with a normal ear and a dead ear. HELP is still available with CROS amplification. CROS is an acronym. It stands for Contralateral Routing Of Signal. CROS means we can place a small hearing aid at the location of the dead ear with a microphone that picks up the sound and transmits it to the good ear by radio waves. The result is hearing, even a whisper, from the dead side, but in the good ear. Results are usually gratifying. The same principle applies with one impaired and one dead ear. Will it work in every case? No. But it’s worth the effort to find out.