Your Private Ear and Hearing Clinic in Dartford, Kent

Tragus is a private ear and hearing clinic in Dartford, serving patients across Kent and South East London. Our experienced clinicians trained and worked in the NHS, providing professional ear wax removal by microsuction, comprehensive hearing tests, tinnitus treatment and expertly fitted hearing aids.

Unlike hearing aids programmed using software alone, every fitting is verified using measurements taken in your own ears. This helps ensure your hearing aids are working properly for your individual hearing loss.

Many of our patients come to us after facing long waiting times or being recommended products they did not need. Appointments are usually available within a few days for patients in Dartford, Bexley, Bexleyheath, Gravesend, Swanley, Greenhithe, Crayford and surrounding areas.

Microsuction is the method hospital ENT departments use. We look into the ear canal under a microscope and lift the wax out with fine suction. No water, no syringing, nothing pushed further in. Most appointments take twenty to thirty minutes and you notice the difference before you stand up.

You don’t need days of drops beforehand, though softening the wax for two or three nights usually makes the appointment quicker and more comfortable. Microsuction is also the safer option if you have a perforated eardrum, grommets, a history of ear surgery, or only one hearing ear, situations where syringing shouldn’t be used at all.

If we look in your ear and there’s no wax to remove, we’ll tell you, and you won’t be charged for a procedure you didn’t need.

A free hearing check tells you whether there’s hearing loss and roughly how much. A full assessment goes considerably further: air and bone conduction across the frequency range, speech testing, and tympanometry to show how your eardrum and middle ear are actually behaving.

The part that matters most isn’t the graph. It’s the conversation about where you struggle, the restaurant, the meeting room, your grandchildren’s voices, because two people with almost identical audiograms can have very different problems. You leave with your results explained and a copy of your audiogram to keep. If you need referring to ENT, we write the referral.

Some people have normal hearing on every test and still can’t follow speech in a noisy room. Auditory processing disorder is a difficulty in how the brain interprets sound rather than in the ear itself, and it is routinely missed because a standard hearing test comes back clear.

Our APD assessment runs two hours and uses a battery of tests a standard appointment doesn’t include. It is most often sought for children struggling in class and for adults who have been told repeatedly that their hearing is fine.

Off-the-shelf plugs either fall out or block everything, which is why most people stop wearing them. Custom plugs are moulded from an impression of your own ear and made to do one job well: musicians’ filters that lower the volume without muffling detail, shooting protection, motorcycling, swimming, or simply sleeping through a snoring partner.