If you haven’t had your hearing tested 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 instead of proactively. The good news: Hearing exams are easy, painless, and provide a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing issues and determining whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
You might not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably recall from your childhood, but you will get a deeper understanding of your hearing health. There are three prevalent kinds of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We usually think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just indicate the intensity of a sound. Tone, what we conversationally think of as pitch, is another key factor. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), 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 set of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. You might also wear a device called a bone oscillator which sounds alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Pure tones are delivered to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pressing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
The lowest 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 gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test evaluates your ability to accurately hear speech, 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 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 depend on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth stops you from reading lips (something you might not even recognize you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to distinguish.
Instead of simply looking at the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also help in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
This type 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. A graph readout will allow your hearing specialist to identify 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 checked by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud noise. Identifying the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. Individuals with profound hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems with the eardrum and/or small 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 going on with your ears.
If you’re having a hard time 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.
