If you haven’t had your hearing tested since you were in grade school, 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 exams are easy, 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.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you probably remember from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s done, but you’ll gain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. There are three prevalent kinds of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One factor that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Tone, what we conversationally think of as pitch, is another key factor. At the lower end of the pitch spectrum, a low bass sound measures between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement associated with tone or pitch), with average speech ranging between 500 and 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 hooked up to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist might use is called a bone oscillator which just measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. Much like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you push a button or raise your hand when a tone sounds either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll track the lowest volume required for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced on one side than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This test also uses headphones, but instead measures your ability to hear words being spoken. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other instances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth stops you from reading lips (something you may not even realize you’ve been doing). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to differentiate.
Instead of only looking at the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help determine.
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 change your ear’s pressure. A graph readout will allow your hearing specialist to determine if there’s a problem 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. When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. Identifying the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist gauge 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 important to include to recognize everything that’s happening with your ears.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, call 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 potential treatment options might be.
