If you haven’t had your hearing tested since your grade school days, you’re not alone, it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. The good news: Hearing tests are easy, painless, and provide a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing issues and assessing whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
You might not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you might recall from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of the health of your hearing. Here are three of the most common kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
One component that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Tone, what we colloquially refer to as pitch, is another key factor. It’s calculated 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. 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 pair of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. You might also use a device called a bone oscillator which sounds scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Much like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you press a button or raise your hand when a tone plays either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll track the minimum 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 difficulty hearing (which can be an integral 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 test also utilizes headphones, but instead tracks your ability to hear words being spoken. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. In other situations, the individual 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 rely on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth keeps you from lip reading (something you may not even realize you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to distinguish.
Rather than just focusing on the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also assist in assessing whether hearing aids could help.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially alter your ear’s pressure. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to identify if there’s a problem with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is working.
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 sound, 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 necessary to trigger this reflex. People with extreme hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues with the eardrum and/or little bones inside the ear, because these can happen 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.
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 inform you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your possible treatment options may be.
