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 diagnosing hearing problems and determining whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you might remember from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s completed, but you’ll gain a much more detailed understanding of your hearing. There are three prevalent types 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 only indicate the intensity of a sound. Another important aspect is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. 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 associated with tone or pitch), with normal speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones connected to an audiometer. You may also use a device called a bone oscillator which sounds alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Pure tones are directed to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pressing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
We’ll monitor the minimum 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 trouble hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This test also utilizes headphones, but instead evaluates your ability to hear speech. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other cases, the person doing 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 mouth, you won’t have any visual cues to help you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to help you. Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for individuals suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Speech audiometry monitors your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which calculates 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 determine.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. A graph readout will allow 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.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear automatically contract. Identifying the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. Individuals with extreme hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most useful 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 know everything that’s happening with your ears.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better understand your hearing health, inform you on what you can do to maintain healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.
