Most individuals aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and probably haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s generally not part of a routine adult physical. Fortunately, 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 using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You may 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 deeper understanding of the health of your hearing. There are three common types of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just express the loudness of a sound. Another important aspect is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring about 50-60 Hz, and general speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to hear.
With pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones attached to an audiometer. You may also wear a device called a bone oscillator which sounds 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 track the lowest volume necessary for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears function: What range of sound you have difficulty hearing (which can be an essential indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you’re experiencing hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This test also utilizes headphones, but instead tracks your ability to hear speech. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. In other cases, the person performing the test will say words to you, but there’s a surprise, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s lips, you won’t get any visual cues to help you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to help you. For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are challenging to differentiate.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which measures how loud certain 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
This kind of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will have a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can identify whether there’s a potential issue such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test makes use of a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. Identifying the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist gauge the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have extreme hearing loss.
It’s essential to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues occur in the little bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, contact us 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 possible treatment options may be.