The majority of people aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and most likely haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical. The good news: Hearing exams are simple, painless, and provide a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and determining whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
You may not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you might recall from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of your hearing health. Here are three of the most prevalent kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only indicate the loudness of a sound. Another important factor is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), with a low bass sound measuring around 50-60 Hz, and general speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the spectrum of frequencies that a healthy human ear can hear.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you put on a pair of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. You may also wear a device called a bone oscillator which seems alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Much 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.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears function: What range of sound you have problems hearing (which can be a key indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you’re suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test evaluates your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds coming at you 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 circumstances, 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 understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker keeps you from reading lips (something you might not even realize you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be hard for individuals suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Speech audiometry monitors your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates 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 type of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it may be a little uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a small probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially change your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum functions, which can indicate whether there’s a possible problem like impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud sound. 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. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have profound hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems 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 essential to include to recognize everything that’s happening with your ears.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, inform you on what you can do to preserve healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.