The underlying issue is that either the hair cells stopped working, or the auditory nerve is damaged in some way. The ideal solution would be to repair the hai

The underlying issue is that either the hair cells stopped working, or the auditory nerve is damaged in some way. The ideal solution would be to repair the hair cells or replace them with a drop-in solution that restores their function. Likewise with the auditory nerve. Of course, these are pie-in-the-sky ideas currently. Sound amplification essentially symptomatically resolves the problem by playing the appropriate frequencies louder, but in the case of hearing loss due to damage, amplification would just exacerbate the problem, unless I am fundamentally misunderstanding something. In layman's terms, it would be like temporarily losing your hearing by going to a rock concert, and then raising the volume of everything around you to rock concert level, so you can continue to hear things.