The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and likely haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both diagnose 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 remember from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of your hearing health. There are three common types of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One component that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Tone, what we conversationally think of as pitch, is another key component. It’s calculated 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. 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 seems alarming 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 plays either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll track the lowest volume required for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced in one ear than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This test also makes use of headphones, but instead measures your ability to hear words being spoken. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other circumstances, 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 comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker 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 hard for people dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which measures how loud particular sounds have to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also help in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. In tympanometry, a small 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 indicate whether there’s a potential problem like impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud noise. Knowing the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. People with profound hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues with the eardrum and/or little bones inside the ear, because these can occur at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s important to include to recognize everything that’s going on with your ears.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help inform you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your possible treatment options might be.
