The majority of people aren’t proactive about their hearing health and probably haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s typically not part of a routine adult physical. The good news: Hearing exams are easy, painless, and supply a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing issues and assessing whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
You may not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you might recall from your childhood, but you will get a deeper understanding of the health of your hearing. There are three prevalent kinds of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only indicate the intensity of a sound. Another important factor is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring about 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you don a pair of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. You might also use a device called a bone oscillator which sounds scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Pure tones are presented to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pushing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
We’ll monitor the minimum volume required for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced on one side than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most trouble hearing, and generally how well your ears are functioning, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This test also makes use of headphones, but instead evaluates your ability to hear words being spoken. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other cases, the person doing the test will say words to you, but there’s a catch, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Hearing individual words means you can’t rely on context to understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker stops you from lip reading (something you might not even know you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be hard for individuals suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Rather than only focusing on the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help determine.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it may be a bit uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a small probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially alter your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will have a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum functions, which can identify whether there’s a potential issue like impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test makes use of a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud noise. 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. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have profound hearing loss.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems occur in the small bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, contact us and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better understand your hearing health, inform you on what you can do to preserve healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.
