The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about their hearing health and probably haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s generally not part of a routine adult physical. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help evaluate whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You may not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you might remember from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of your hearing health. There are three common types 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 just indicate the loudness 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 agency), with a low bass sound measuring around 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 pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones attached to an audiometer. You may also wear a device called a bone oscillator which sounds scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Much like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you press a button or raise your hand when a tone plays 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 marked in one ear than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are functioning, will be measured 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 situations, the individual carrying out the test will say words to you, but there’s a surprise, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend on context to understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker keeps you from reading lips (something you may not even realize you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be difficult for individuals suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates how loud particular sounds need to be in order to be heard. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help determine.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a little uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. A graph readout will allow your hearing specialist to determine if there’s an issue with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is working.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud sound. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise required to trigger this reflex. Individuals with extreme hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues occur in the small bones inside of the ears and can occur at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, give us a call 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.