What Happens During a Hearing Test?

What happens during a hearing test? Usually the test, itself, takes about a half hour in the sound booth. But there's more to than that. It's pretty comprehensive in our office, when you add in all of the important little details, like listening to you tell your history. 

So if someone knows that they mishear, then what's the point? Well, the point is that no one looks like they have a hearing loss.

In general, in an audiology practice, you have your hearing tested in a sound booth. But before that happens, there's a lot that's involved to make sure that we're evaluating you and the way that you're feeling and hearing as well as listening to what you're experiencing. That goes way beyond just listening for beeps and raising your hand. (You could do that through an online app. And it wouldn't it give you the answers that you need. 

So when we begin the evaluation, you will first be asked to answer a series of questions, even though you filled out paperwork because we'd like to hear from you first-hand about you and your medical history. Next, we look in your ears. If there is wax, we will  remove it prior to testing. We, next, make sure that your middle ear system is working properly. This is tested using tympanometry. We test your acoustic reflexes and then test the inner ear with otoacoustic emissions. We conduct the rest of the testing in our large sound booth with the door closed and calibrated headphones. We find the softest sounds you can hear in each ear and record your thresholds on a graph, called an audiogram.

Next, we are testing your ability to hear words. You will be asked to repeat words at different loudness levels. And testing your ability to understand words and sentences in noise. So we're going to find out everything we can about you. And we're going to go over the test results up on a screen and give you copies of those test results, so that you can discuss it with your doctor and your family.

Lastly, we think it's important to create a treatment plan for you. This could involve aural rehabilitation or auditory training. It may or may not involve hearing instruments. Some of our new patients have really good hearing aids that they purchased elsewhere and we take the time to reprogram the hearing aids. Some people need new ones, but that is all part of our collaborative discussion about how to help you now.

Now, if the hearing is normal, we can go into more specialized testing. We can test your hearing with more extensive central auditory processing tests, including dichotic tests, where one sentence is in one ear and a different sentence is in the other ear. Can you separate those sentences and repeat back the quieter of the two? We can test you with competing numbers. We can test you with competing words. We can test your ability to listen to a sounded out word, and test your abilities to process those sounds and formulate a new word.

There is so much that can be tested beyond just the beep test. 

I hope this answered your question. If you have any questions, type them below, you can even email us at info@helpingyourhearing.com.