Most people aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s typically not part of a routine adult physical. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help assess whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You might not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably recall 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 component 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 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 hooked up to an audiometer. You may also wear 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 push a button or raise your hand when a tone sounds either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll monitor the lowest volume necessary for you to hear each sound. 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 are suffering from 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 speech, 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 noise. In other situations, the person performing 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 understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker keeps you from lip reading (something you may not even realize you’ve been doing). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to distinguish.
Speech audiometry monitors your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates how loud particular sounds have to be in order to be heard. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help identify.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially change your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will have a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum functions, which can identify whether there’s a potential problem like impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test utilizes 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 automatically contract. Identifying the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist gauge the extent of hearing loss. People with profound hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
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 essential to include to recognize everything that’s going on with your ears.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better understand 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.
