Because your brain is adaptive, you may be the last one to know that your hearing is receding. Then, uncertainty keeps many from seeking informed, professional care.
A comprehensive hearing assessment with our team at Lawrence Otolaryngology Associates in Lawrence and Ottawa can uncover the status of your ear health and hearing with a painless and noninvasive test of each part of your body’s hearing system. Identifying your personal hearing profile helps to guide treatment and inform long-term care, since your hearing can change over time.
With all this in mind, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the hearing assessment process as well as what to expect from both your tests and your diagnosis.
Regardless of whether you have hearing loss or not, your hearing profile is already unique. When hearing performance drops off, you now have other modifiers that set you apart.
A comprehensive hearing test looks at all parts of the hearing process, a system that collects acoustic energy from the air (the outer ear), converts it to mechanical energy (the eardrum and middle ear), before finally generating tiny electrical signals in the inner ear for delivery to the brain, where these impulses become decoded into the sounds you perceive.
A hearing test can not only uncover existing hearing loss, it can identify problems before they significantly affect your daily living. Even if you have no hearing loss, a comprehensive evaluation sets a baseline for future analysis.
As with many medical appointments, we’ll start with a review of your medical history as well as a brief history of any ear or hearing-related issues. This might include your family’s history, medications you’re currently taking, and your history of noise exposure. Long-term exposure to high levels of noise or music can have a cumulative effect.
We’ll examine your ears for physical conditions like infection or a buildup of earwax, which can create a barrier that affects your hearing. We check the mechanical performance of the middle ear and the eardrum before moving on to a test of your hearing itself.
Pure-tone tests pinpoint the softest sounds you can perceive at various frequencies, and speech tests determine the clarity of your hearing. We may also choose additional tests for specific symptoms or aspects of your medical history.
Your hearing isn’t a single, objective function, so we combine the results of each stage of your test into account. Your hearing profile includes one or more of these factors:
When we combine all this data, the next steps in treatment usually become clear.
If you notice signs of hearing loss, contact Lawrence Otolaryngology Associates by phone or online to schedule your comprehensive hearing test. Book your visit with our nearest location today.
