If you haven’t had your hearing tested since you were in grade school, you’re not alone, it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. The good news: Hearing tests are easy, painless, and supply a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and determining whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
You might not get a lollipop after your full 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 common types of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One factor that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Another important aspect is pitch or tone which assesses 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 normal speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range of frequencies that a healthy human ear can hear.
For pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones connected to an audiometer. You might 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 monitor the lowest volume necessary for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have a hard time 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 type of test measures your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other instances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
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 lip reading (something you might not even know you’ve been doing). Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be hard for individuals dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Rather than simply focusing on the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help determine.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it may be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum is working, which can indicate whether there’s a possible problem like 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 noise, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise required to trigger this reflex. Individuals with extreme hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
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 occur at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better comprehend 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.