If you haven’t had your hearing tested since you were in grade school, you’re not the only one, it’s often not part of a regular adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help evaluate 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 prevalent types of hearing tests, each of which will supply 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. Another important factor is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the tone 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. 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 wear 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 necessary for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more marked 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 type of test evaluates your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes ask you to repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background noise. In other cases, the person doing the test will say words to you, but there’s a catch, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend on context to understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker keeps you from reading lips (something you may not even know you’ve been doing). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to distinguish.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates how loud specific sounds need to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also help in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a small 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 uses a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud noise. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise necessary to trigger this reflex. Individuals with profound hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
It’s important 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 a hard time hearing, contact us and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help educate you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your possible treatment options may be.