The majority of people aren’t proactive about their hearing health and most likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s typically not part of a routine adult physical. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help evaluate whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You might not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you might remember from your childhood, but you will get a deeper understanding of your hearing health. Here are three of the most common kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just express the loudness of a sound. Tone, what we conversationally think of as pitch, is another key component. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), with a low bass sound measuring around 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones attached to an audiometer. You might also use a device called a bone oscillator which sounds alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Much like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you press a button or raise your hand when a tone plays either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll monitor the lowest volume necessary for you to hear each sound. 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 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 rely on context to understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth stops you from reading lips (something you might not even know you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for individuals suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which measures how loud certain 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 kind of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum functions, which can identify whether there’s a potential issue such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test utilizes a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! Muscles in your ear involuntarily 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 extreme hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most helpful 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 essential to include to recognize everything that’s going on with your ears.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, give us a call and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help inform you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options might be.