If you haven’t had your hearing tested since your grade school days, you’re not alone, it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. The good news: Hearing exams are simple, painless, and supply a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing problems and assessing whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you may remember from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s completed, but you’ll gain a much more detailed understanding of your hearing. There are three common kinds of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We typically think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only express the loudness of a sound. Another important factor is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring around 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 connected to an audiometer. You might also use a device called a bone oscillator which sounds scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Pure tones are presented to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pressing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
We’ll monitor the minimum volume necessary for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced 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 type of test measures 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 sound. In other cases, the person 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 rely on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker keeps you from reading lips (something you may not even know you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to distinguish.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates 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 identify.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, 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 identify whether there’s a potential problem such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud noise. Identifying the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist gauge the extent of hearing loss. People with extreme hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
It’s essential to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems happen in the small bones inside of the ears and can occur at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help inform you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options might be.