A 71-year-old has been turning the TV up for two years. His daughter finally sits down to sort it out. She searches hearing tests near her father, compares what she finds against Costco and a direct-to-consumer brand with a slick site, and books whichever option answers her questions in plain language. Your listing has an old photo and no posts since last year.
What stings is the mismatch. You did four years of clinical training, you do real-ear measurement, you counsel families through the adjustment period — and you are being compared, on a phone screen, against a fitting done in twenty minutes at a warehouse club.
So the practice fills with patients who found you by referral, which works until a referring physician retires or a health system routes their patients elsewhere. Meanwhile the new-patient side of the schedule never quite builds on its own.
And every one of those patients you did not reach comes back to somebody in three years, dissatisfied with an ill-fitted device, having decided that hearing aids do not work.