Managing hearing loss with hearing tests

Read More About Health Care

As with any disease the best way to stop hearing loss is to detect it while it is still in its infancy stage and treat it as is. Attending concerts regularly where the sound levels are high is one way of contracting hearing loss. It is very common for people to be born with hearing loss instead of acquiring it from some other means.

Other times it may be the result of an illness or disease that you contracted from someone or something that has affected your hearing. Believe it or not, if a person doesn't lose their sense of hearing from some kind of sickness, they might lose it while taking medication instead. Bumping your head is another very common way of people losing their sense of hearing.

Easily the most common cause of hearing loss in a person is due to exposure in areas with very loud noise pollution. Noisy people, loud noises from appliances, office equipments, factory machinery are all samples of noise pollution. Your not so everyday type of noise pollution for example are the loud sounds coming from an explosion or even gunfire.

Whatever the reasons for hearing loss, the number one cure for it is prevention, and the first step for prevention is through diagnosis. A hearing disorder that is left to progress and age is more difficult to treat than one that is treated early on. The only way to detect hearing problems is by performing hearing tests on the person.

A doctor or specialist will always use an audiometer, if present, to check a person's hearing against different sound volumes and frequencies. A soundproof booth with earphones provided, that are connected to an audiometer is the basic setup of this type of hearing test. The physician or attending technician works the audiometer so that the patient hears different decibel level sounds and frequencies.

The patient inside the soundproof booth should respond to hearing the sound by pressing on a button. A graph of frequency against volume will be plotted by the specialist to complete the test. Once the test is complete, a simple view of the graph can easily reveal if the subject does indeed have hearing loss and at what frequencies and decibel levels.

Two other tests called the Weber and Rinne tests are performed to test for the type of hearing loss a person is afflicted with. To determine what hearing loss the person is suffering from, a tuning fork is used by the tests. The Weber test is a simple and quick screening test for hearing loss while the Rinne test is performed to confirm the nature of hearing loss whether conductive or sensorineural.

Starting with the Weber test, a tuning fork is placed in the middle of the forehead at a point that has the same distance from both ears. The tuning fork will emit a sound and if the sound is heard equally, then the person will either have no hearing loss or equal hearing loss in both ears. Asymmetric hearing loss can be labeled on a person who does not hear the same sound resulting from the tuning fork.

A person can find out if he or she has conductive hearing loss or sensorineural hearing loss, by going under the Rinne test. The two tests can also be performed to find out if the right or left ear has which type of hearing loss. Any specialist or expert that is knowledgeable will recommend all three tests.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

When you would like to get more information on free hearing test check out this site. Further information on hearing screening can be found there.

Please Rate this Article

Not yet Rated

Click the XML Icon Above to Receive Health Care Articles Via RSS!

Additional Articles From - Home | Health | Health Care

Our other websites
All about SEO
Beauty Tips Forum

	Print This Article
	Post Comment
	Add To Favorites
	Email to Friends
	Ezine Ready

Submit Articles
Member Login
Link Us
Submission Guidelines
Ezine Notifications
Article RSS Feeds
Sitemap

New Stuff
About Us
Developer
Good shopping portal
Link to Us
Contact Us
Privacy Policy
Terms of Service