If you haven’t had a hearing exam since you were in grade school, you’re not alone, it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. The good news: Hearing exams are easy, painless, and supply a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and assessing whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
You might not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you might remember from your childhood, but you will get a deeper understanding of the health 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 normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just indicate the intensity of a sound. Tone, what we colloquially refer to as pitch, is another key component. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), with a low bass sound measuring about 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
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 alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. A lot 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.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears function: What range of sound you have a hard time hearing (which can be an integral indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you are experiencing hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This type of test measures your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other situations, the person carrying out the test will speak words to you, but there’s a catch, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Hearing individual words means you can’t rely on context to understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker keeps you from lip reading (something you might not even realize you’ve been doing). Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be hard for people dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Instead of simply focusing on the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also assist in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might be a little uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to identify if there’s an issue with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
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. Knowing the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in people who have extreme hearing loss.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems happen 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 a hard time hearing, give us a call and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, educate 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.