(FORTUNE Magazine) – At meetings you deliver sparkling insights. Problem is, you can't tell when a colleague has made the same point minutes before. To your ears, Joan's comment that a job seeker would "fit in" sounds '60s-surreal--did she really say "sit in"?

You're suffering from one of the Woodstock generation's most common and most overlooked ailments. About one in six Americans between 45 and 65 is hard of hearing. But only 15% of people with hearing loss wear the hearing aids they need to avoid mistakes and misunderstandings in the office and to enjoy the noisy parties they've come to dread. The fact that most insurance plans won't cover hearing aids doesn't help. And aids carry a stigma. "I never wore a hearing aid to work, even though I needed it," says Bill Sheeder, 63, retired dean of students at the University of Miami. "People associate them with mental slowness. It's not a plus to have a piece of plastic sticking out of your ear." Big improvements in technology, though, mean that today's best hearing aids are far smaller and more attractive than the old shrimp-sized gadgets, and they enable some people to hear almost as well as they used to.

Serious hearing loss usually doesn't begin until one's late 60s and 70s, but baby-boomers may be vulnerable in middle age for two reasons. The first is family history: Some people are programmed to suffer partial deafness in their early 40s. Second, boomers have always loved what's loud: rock concerts, motorcycles, Walkmen. High decibels damage tiny hair cells in the inner ear, causing hearing loss. (Science can't reverse the damage; stem-cell research could eventually provide a full cure, but a breakthrough is at least a decade away.) Middle-aged hearing loss often starts with a gradual erosion of the ability to hear high-pitched voices and soft consonants like s, p, and t. Many boomers' hearing also is much weaker when there's lots of background noise--in a busy restaurant, say.

Sound like you? It's time for a hearing test (cost: about $150, covered by insurance). Most physicians don't include hearing tests with annual checkups, so you'll need a referral to an audiologist. If the test finds that you can't hear everything a high-pitched voice is saying at normal volume--what audiologists call "moderate" loss--you need hearing aids. Today's digital aids are custom-programmed to isolate frequencies the wearer has trouble hearing and to amplify the sounds to the right volume. They can also damp out background noise from fans, traffic, and so on.

Such manufacturers as Siemens, Widex, and Starkey Laboratories offer tiny aids that fit so far down in the ear canal they're practically invisible. Starkey's new Axent costs $3,200 per ear. The tiniest aids cannot distinguish between noise and voices, however, and some have an annoying tendency to emit high-pitched squeals from feedback. A new solution to the ambient-noise problem: hearing aids with two microphones. One mike amplifies the voice of the person in front of you. The other picks up and mutes noise and conversations off to the side. The downside is that even the smallest two-mike model is gumdrop-sized--too big to hide. A pair of two-mike aids from Phonak or GN ReSound sells for about $7,000.

Want to go even higher-tech? The first surgically implanted hearing aid, Vibrant Soundbridge by Symphonix, may be for you. A surgeon places a magnet the size of a grain of rice in your middle ear. Behind your ear, under your hair, you wear a quarter-sized digital processor that stays in place because it is magnetically attracted to the implant. The processor sends sound through the head in the form of radio waves that make the magnet vibrate. By moving the tiny bones in the middle ear, the vibrations send sound to the brain. Implanting a Soundbridge in one ear costs a whopping $15,000, and only 700 patients worldwide are using the device, which was approved by the FDA in 2000.

--SHAWN TULLY