All you need to know about hearing tests

Hearing loss is best treated when it is still in its early stages, but in order to do this detection will have to be done first. Studies have shown that immersing yourself in noise, like in an airport, concerts and so forth is one way of getting hearing loss. A person who has been born with improperly formed ear or other body parts that affect hearing may be handicapped with a hearing loss.

Other times, hearing is a temporary thing caused by some kind of sickness a person caught from someone else. There are also some medication that are known to cause hearing loss in people as well. Hitting or bumping your head really hard doesn't just hurt, it can also lead to hearing impairment.

Easily the most common cause of hearing loss in a person is due to exposure in areas with very loud noise pollution. Examples of this type of noise pollution are barking dogs, car alarms, industrial noise from factories and manufacturing plants. Your not so everyday type of noise pollution for example are the loud sounds coming from an explosion or even gunfire.

A person has the best chances against hearing loss when it is diagnosed early and treated in its early stages. As a rule of thumb most health problems are easier to treat today than tomorrow. Hearing tests are performed on a person suspected of having hearing problems.

A hearing test performed by an audiologist using an audiometer is simply a way for a specialist to evaluate the sensitivity of a person?s sense of hearing. The patient will be seated in a soundproof booth wearing headphones connected to an audiometer. The audiologist, pushes buttons on the audiometer to send sounds to the person sitting inside the booth.

Upon hearing the sound at a specific volume and frequency, the patient will need to press a button. More than one sound is tested and a graph is plotted out by the audio specialist. The importance of this test reveals what specific sound frequencies, volume the subject has a hard time hearing and if indeed he or she has hearing loss.

After the audiometry hearing test, two other tests may be administered to determined the type of hearing loss and these are called the Weber and Rinne tests. To determine what hearing loss the person is suffering from, a tuning fork is used by the tests. Weber tests can check if a person has hearing loss but not the type, while the Rinne test can determine which type and in what ear.

With the Weber test, the tuning fork is placed in the exact middle of the forehead. Someone with normal hearing or hearing loss that is the same in both ears will hear sound the same way in both ears. If the sound is heard differently in one ear than the other then the person is said to have asymmetric hearing loss.

The Rinne test is administered after the conclusion of the Weber test, to find out which type of hearing loss is present. It is also possible with the two tests to determine which ear has what type of hearing loss. The best recommendation is to use the Weber and Rinne tests with an audiometry.

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