Most individuals aren’t proactive about their hearing health and 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 easy, painless, and supply a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing issues 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 your hearing health. Here are three of the most common 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 express 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 about 50-60 Hz, and general speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones connected to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist might use is known as a bone oscillator which just measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. 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.
The minimum volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears function: What range of sound you have difficulty hearing (which can be a key indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you’re experiencing hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This test also makes use of headphones, but instead evaluates your ability to hear speech. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. In other situations, the person carrying out 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 stops 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 challenging for individuals dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates how loud certain sounds need 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 kind of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it may be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will have a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum functions, which can identify whether there’s a possible issue such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test uses a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. Identifying the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist gauge the extent of hearing loss. Individuals with profound hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues 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 know everything that’s going on with your ears.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better understand your hearing health, inform you on what you can do to maintain healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.
