Testing Hearing Loss With Hearing Tests
A lot of things can lead to hearing loss and the best thing to do to avoid deafness all together is by preventing it in the first place. Hearing loss can be a side effect of some disease, medication or can be caused by being exposed to loud sounds. Hearing impairment can be a disability a person is born or has grown up with, since the body sometimes don’t form correctly.
Hearing loss in babies are a very common thing, as hearing loss happens all the time in babies. Kids as small as possible can already get hearing loss if not properly protected from it. Just because a person is born normal, he or she can still get it from sustaining head injuries or a person’s genetics.
The most common cause of hearing loss, however, whether it is gradual or instantaneous is due to noise pollution or environmental noise. This can be the constant loud noise that you hear everyday, for example living near an airport or a freeway. Noise pollution that are not very common are the sounds coming from ammunition or gunshots.
Hearing aids are given by doctors to effectively treat many kinds of hearing impairment. There are many types of hearing aids and each will have their own pros and cons. The main function of a hearing aid is to collect, funnel and amplify surrounding sound to a person.
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. A person undergoing the test will be asked to wear earphones connected to an audiometer inside a soundproof booth. The specialist or audiologist then pushes buttons on the audiometer to produce tones at different frequencies and volume.
The person inside the booth should respond at once and at first instance of hearing the sound. A graph of sound frequency against sound volume will be made to conclude the test. A simple glance of the graph by the doctor will uncover the specific frequencies and volume the patient is having a hard time hearing.
An audtiometry test is not sufficient to figure out the real problem a person is having, but with the use of the Rinne and Weber test, the type of hearing loss can be determined. 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.
Doctor’s and patients are also looking forward to gene therapy. The annoying thing with hearing aids is the need to replace the expensive batteries it has, with gene therapy all these are gone as everything is natural. Gene therapy is the hope of tomorrow and is still a new science today.
Prevention is the best medicine when it comes to hearing impairment but sometimes there is nothing a person can do but live with hearing treatments. A specialist trained in the various aspecs of hearing treatment is the only way to know which hearing treatment should be used. No time is better than today to start taking care of your hearing.
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