Most people aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and probably haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s normally not part of a routine adult physical. Luckily, 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 determine 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 recall from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of the health of your hearing. 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 loudness of a sound. Tone, what we colloquially think of as pitch, is another key component. It’s calculated 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 don a pair of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist might use is known as a bone oscillator which just measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. 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.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. In other words, this test assesses 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 are experiencing hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This test also makes use of headphones, but instead evaluates your ability to hear words being spoken. Your hearing specialist will sometimes ask you to repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. Your hearing specialist will, in other instances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s lips, you won’t have any visual cues to assist you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to fall back on. For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to differentiate.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which measures how loud specific 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 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 determine if there’s an issue with your eardrum like earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is working.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud noise. Identifying the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. Individuals with extreme hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues with the eardrum and/or small bones inside the ear, because these can occur at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s important to include to know everything that’s happening with your ears.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, educate 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.