The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about their hearing health and probably haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s usually 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 diagnosing hearing issues and determining whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
You may not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably remember from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of the health of your hearing. There are three common types of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One factor that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Tone, what we colloquially refer to as pitch, is another key factor. It’s calculated in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), with a low bass sound measuring around 50-60 Hz, and general 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 set of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. You may also wear a device called a bone oscillator which sounds alarming 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 tracked. Whether your hearing loss is more marked in one ear than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most trouble hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This type of test tracks your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds being played through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes ask you to repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. In other cases, the person performing 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 rely on context to understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth 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 difficult for people suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Instead of just looking at the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also aid in determining whether hearing aids could help.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it might 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 get a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum functions, which can indicate whether there’s a potential problem such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud noise. Knowing the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. 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 happen at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s important to include to know everything that’s happening with your ears.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, give us a call and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, inform you on what you can do to maintain healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.