The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and most likely haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical. The good news: Hearing exams are simple, painless, and supply a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing issues and determining whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
You may 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 greater understanding of the health of your hearing. Here are three of the most prevalent types of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
We usually think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just indicate the loudness of a sound. Tone, what we conversationally think of as pitch, is another key factor. At the lower end of the pitch spectrum, a low bass sound measures between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement related to tone or pitch), with normal 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 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 simply measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. 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 track the minimum volume required for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more marked on one side than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, 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. Your hearing specialist will, in other instances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend 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 individuals dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Instead of just focusing on the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures 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 identify.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially change your ear’s pressure. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to identify if there’s a problem with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
A related test utilizes a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud sound. 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. There’s no reflex response in people who have profound hearing loss.
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 recognize everything that’s happening with your ears.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, contact us and schedule a hearing test! 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.