Thursday, October 31, 2013

Everything You Need To Know About An Audiometer

Everything You Need To Know About An Audiometer

By Allyson Burke


If you feel like you might have trouble hearing, an audiometer hearing test might be the first thing that you will try out to find out the truth. In general, a doctor will test your hearing abilities with various devices first, including basic screenings and tuning forks. After that, he should have a pretty good understanding whether you are suffering from hearing loss. If this happens to be the case, then he should request for more thorough tests to be done.

This is where an audiometer would come in extremely handy. This test cannot just be done by any random doctor, though. In fact, a lot of the time, a specialist will be assigned to conduct this test on you. This specialist is called an audiologist and will guide you through every step of the way in order to help treat the problem at hand.

When it comes to this special screening, your audiologist will aim to find out how far your abilities go in terms of hearing. This usually involves a slew of tests instead of a single one, wherein you will be asked questions in order to gather important information behind your condition. Your medical history will be questioned before you go through the actual audiometer test, as well.

Throughout this test, headphones will be placed over your ears, so that any other sounds will be completely blocked out as needed. Soon after that, various sounds will be sent into each one of your ears to find out where the loss actually is. After all, there are some cases wherein the hearing loss is only experienced in one ear as opposed to in both.

The sounds that are sent into you ears might arrive at different frequencies or levels. This is done to find out how well you can hear them and whether you can hear them at all. To tell the doctor where you are hearing the sounds from, he may ask you to raise the hand on the side of whichever ear you can hear sounds from as the test progresses.

You should notice some sounds getting louder and getting more faint. Other times, you might not hear sounds at all, but this would be completely normal. However, you doctor will need to know just how low of a sound you can actually hear.

The information taken from this will tell your doctor about the kind of potential hearing loss you might have. It may also pinpoint whether you are in need of more thorough evaluations of your hearing abilities. As such, you should take your sweet time when it comes to this test and make sure that you answer everything accurately instead of guessing things.

The good news is that you can learn a lot about your hearing problems just by going through an audiometer test. Once your hearing levels have been properly gauged by it, your specialist can then give you the right treatment for your condition in no time or put you through more tests as needed.




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