If you haven’t had your hearing tested since your grade school days, you’re not the only one, it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help evaluate whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A full audiometry test is more involved than what you may recall from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s done, but you’ll obtain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. There are three common kinds of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just indicate the loudness of a sound. Another important aspect is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), with a low bass sound measuring about 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range of frequencies that a healthy human ear can hear.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you put on a set of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. You might also wear a device called a bone oscillator which sounds scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. A lot like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you push a button or raise your hand when a tone sounds either in your left ear or your right ear.
The minimum volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced on one side than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are functioning, will be gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test tracks your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. In other cases, the individual carrying out the test will speak words to you, but there’s a catch, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker stops you from lip reading (something you may not even realize you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for individuals suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Speech audiometry monitors your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which calculates how loud specific sounds have to be in order to be heard. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help identify.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to determine if there’s a problem with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
A related test utilizes a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! Muscles in your ear involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud sound. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise required to trigger this reflex. People with profound hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems with the eardrum and/or little bones inside the ear, because these can occur at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s essential to include to know everything that’s happening with your ears.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help educate you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your possible treatment options might be.