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Hearing Evaluation

What to Expect During a Hearing Evaluation

 

A diagnostic hearing evaluation takes about an hour to complete. During this time a thorough patient case history will be obtained. This history may reveal the cause of hearing loss. Some medical issues can contribute to hearing-related difficulties and certain symptoms might be clues as to the cause of hearing loss.

Your diagnostic hearing evaluation will be conducted in a sound-treated room. Some patients feel this environment is not representative of the “real world,” and they are correct. Hearing testing in a sound room does, however, give the most accurate information about the type and extent of damage to the hearing mechanism. By using the information obtained in a quiet, sound-treated room, our audiologists can predict “real world” hearing performance.

During the diagnostic hearing evaluation, you will be asked to listen for tones of varying pitch. Speech sounds are made up of a combination of pitches ranging from bass to treble. Our audiologists determine the softest sounds you are able to detect at each of these pitches and then evaluate which speech sounds will be most affected by a specific hearing loss.