The majority of people aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s generally not part of a routine adult physical. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help assess whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You may 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 the health of your hearing. There are three common kinds of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We usually think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just indicate the intensity of a sound. Tone, what we conversationally refer to as pitch, is another key factor. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring around 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 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. Pure tones are presented to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pressing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
The minimum volume that you can hear the tones will then be tracked. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced on one side than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most trouble hearing, and generally how well your ears are functioning, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is 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 rely on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker stops you from reading lips (something you may not even recognize you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for people dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates how loud certain sounds have 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 usually won’t cause pain, but it might be a little uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to determine if there’s an issue with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is working.
A related test uses 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 determine the extent of hearing loss. People with profound hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems happen in the small bones inside of the ears and can occur at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help educate you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options may be.