If you haven’t had a hearing exam since your grade school days, you’re not alone, it’s often not part of a regular adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. The good news: Hearing tests are easy, 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 might recall from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s completed, but you’ll obtain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. There are three prevalent 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 just indicate the intensity of a sound. Tone, what we conversationally think of as pitch, is another key component. At the lower end of the pitch spectrum, a low bass sound clocks in between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement related to tone or pitch), with average speech ranging between 500 and 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 don a set of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist may use is called a bone oscillator which just 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 plays either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll track the minimum volume necessary for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have problems hearing (which can be a key indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you’re suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test tracks your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds being played through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. In other situations, the person doing the test will say words to you, but there’s a surprise, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth keeps you from reading lips (something you might not even realize you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for people suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Speech audiometry monitors your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates how loud specific sounds have to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also aid in determining whether hearing aids could help.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a little 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 determine if there’s a problem with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear automatically contract. Identifying the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have profound hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems with the eardrum and/or small bones inside the ear, because these can occur at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s essential to include to know everything that’s going on with your ears.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, inform you on what you can do to preserve healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.