If you haven’t had your hearing tested since your grade school days, you’re not alone, it’s often not part of a routine adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. The good news: Hearing exams are simple, painless, and provide a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing problems and assessing whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
You may not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you might remember from your childhood, but you will get a deeper understanding of the health of your hearing. There are three prevalent kinds of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only indicate the intensity 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 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 is able to 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 seems scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Pure tones are delivered 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 monitored. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have difficulty 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 type of test evaluates your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some circumstances, 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.
Because you are unable to see the speaker’s lips, you won’t have any visual cues to help 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 challenging to differentiate.
Speech audiometry monitors your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which measures 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
Alright, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. A graph readout will allow your hearing specialist to identify if there’s a problem with your eardrum like 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 automatically contract when you are exposed to loud sound. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise necessary 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 happen in the small bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
Are you having difficulty 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 possible treatment options might be.
