If you haven’t had a hearing exam since you were in grade school, you’re not alone, it’s often not part of a regular adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. 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 determine whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you might remember from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s completed, but you’ll gain a much clearer understanding 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 typically think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only express the intensity of a sound. Tone, what we colloquially think of as pitch, is another key component. At the lower end of the tone spectrum, a low bass sound clocks in between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement associated with tone or pitch), with average speech ranging between 500 and 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 might also use a device called a bone oscillator which seems scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. A lot like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you press 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 pronounced on one side 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 kind of test tracks your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other cases, the person 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 rely on context to understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker keeps 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 difficult for people suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Speech audiometry monitors your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which measures how loud specific 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 kind of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can indicate whether there’s a possible problem such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud noise. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise needed to trigger this reflex. Individuals with profound hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
It’s essential 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.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better understand your hearing health, educate 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.
