Do you suspect you have hearing loss but haven’t had your hearing checked yet? If so, you’re not alone: 37 million adults in America have some difficulty hearing, but only one in five seek help for their hearing loss. If you’re ready to seek help with your hearing loss but aren’t sure where to start, this page is for you.
How to Begin Your Hearing Health Journey
There are myriad ways to treat hearing loss, and there is a treatment option that will best serve your hearing needs. To find out what it is, you’ll first need to get your hearing evaluated. You’ll need to discover:
- Whether or not you have hearing loss
- What type of hearing loss you have
- The severity of your hearing loss
There are two hearing evaluation tools at your disposal: hearing screenings and hearing tests. While these may sound similar, they have some critical differences that you need to know as you begin your hearing treatment journey.
Hearing Screenings
A hearing screening is essentially your preamble to a hearing test. It is simple and quick, designed to identify whether or not you have normal hearing levels. Your result from a hearing screening will simply be “pass” or “fail.”
In all likelihood, you’ve had a hearing screening before at school, work or during a routine health check-up. You can even do them online for free. While wearing headphones, listen to a series of tones and indicate if you can hear them. If you can hear all the tones at the expected “normal” levels, your hearing is considered to be in the healthy range.
Hearing Tests
On the other hand, a hearing test will go much more in-depth into your hearing loss and hearing needs. During a hearing test, your audiologist will compile a detailed evaluation of your hearing ability, known as an audiogram.
There are a few different assessments that can be performed at a hearing test. The most common is the pure-tone test, which will, at first, look very similar to the hearing screener, as it uses headphones and listening for tones, but a pure-tone test can measure your hearing threshold at different frequencies. There are also speech audiometry tests, which evaluate how well you understand spoken communication, and tympanometry, which checks the condition of the physical structures of your middle ear.
When to Choose a Hearing Screening or a Hearing Test
Hearing screenings are a preliminary tool, and their strength is telling you whether further action is needed. If you pass a hearing screening, then no need to seek further help for your hearing loss yet. If you fail, it’s a good indication that it’s time to schedule a formal hearing test with an audiologist.
Hearing screenings are also useful for early detection in children and babies. Newborns are often given a hearing screen in the hospital shortly after birth, and children often get them in school. Because they’re quick and easy, they’re ideal for testing a large group.
However, to begin any kind of treatment of hearing loss, you’ll need to start with the audiogram obtained by a hearing test with an audiologist. The results of a hearing screening are not thorough enough to plot a treatment course for hearing loss.
If you’re ready to schedule a hearing test or have any further questions about the differences between hearing screenings and tests, contact M.K. Larson Audiology today.
