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. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help assess whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You may not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably remember 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
One factor that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Tone, what we colloquially think of as pitch, is another key factor. It’s calculated 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. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the spectrum 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. Another device that your hearing specialist might use is known as a bone oscillator which just measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. Much like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you push 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. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have a hard time hearing (which can be a key indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you’re experiencing hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test evaluates your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes ask you to repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. In other situations, the individual doing the test will speak 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 comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker stops you from lip reading (something you may not even recognize you’ve been doing). Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be difficult for individuals suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Rather than just looking at the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry evaluates 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
Alright, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum is working, which can indicate 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! When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. Knowing the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in people who have profound hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues with the eardrum and/or small bones inside the ear, because these can occur at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s important to include to recognize everything that’s going on with your ears.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better comprehend 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.
