If you haven’t had a hearing exam since you were in grade school, you’re not the only one, it’s often not part of a routine adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. The good news: Hearing tests are easy, painless, and provide a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing problems and assessing whether interventions 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 deeper understanding of the health of your hearing. There are three common types of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Tone, what we conversationally refer to as pitch, is another key factor. At the lower end of the tone spectrum, a low bass sound clocks in between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement related to tone or pitch), with normal speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones attached to an audiometer. You might also use a device called a bone oscillator which seems scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. A lot 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.
We’ll monitor the minimum volume necessary for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have problems hearing (which can be an essential 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 tracks your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes ask you to repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. In other cases, the person doing the test will speak 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 stops you from lip reading (something you might not even recognize you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for people suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Speech audiometry monitors your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which measures how loud specific sounds need to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also assist in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can identify whether there’s a possible issue such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test utilizes 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 noise. Knowing the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have extreme hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems with the eardrum and/or little 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 know everything that’s going on with your ears.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, contact us and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better understand 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.