Visalia Hearing Center Conducts a Complete
Auditory System Analysis

We start our consultations with a conversation about you. This conversation gives us the opportunity to get to know you better and helps us understand the challenges you’re facing and the goals you have for our time together.

We will ask questions about your occupation and lifestyle, including hobbies, special interests, and the types of leisure activities that you enjoy, as well as your medical history, any medications you’re taking, and any family history related to hearing loss.

The information we’ll gather will help us understand your risks of hearing loss. We believe in patient-centered care, so we’ll give you an opportunity to ask questions or express concerns related to your hearing loss and/or the hearing care services we provide.

Tinnitus is often among the symptoms of those experiencing hearing challenges due to a damaged auditory system, so be sure to bring it up during your initial interview if it’s an issue for you.

The next phase of a hearing test at Visalia Hearing Center is a physical examination of your ears using an otoscope, which is a magnifying glass with a light in a tapered tip. The purpose of a physical examination of your ears is to evaluate the health of the ear canal and eardrum. We’ll look for skin conditions, earwax accumulation, or the presence of other obstructions in your ear canal.

In some cases, restoring your hearing requires little more than removing earwax, a bug, or some other foreign object, and in other cases, we might find inflammation or a growth that is blocking your ear canal.

During the next phase of your hearing evaluation, we will conduct a series of audiometric tests designed to determine the type and severity of your hearing loss.

Sound Booth Examinations
This is the real “meaty” part of the appointment. An entire 40+ minute battery of tests will be used to ensure the correct type and severity of hearing loss is diagnosed and proper treatment options are recommended. To get the desired outcome, these measurements should not be completed on a smartphone/tablet with wireless headphones or at a table in an open room – they must be done with calibrated diagnostic equipment in a certified sound treated booth.

Pure Tone Threshold Tests (Audiometry)
Both bone conduction and air conduction threshold testing are used to measure the level of hearing. The two tests are similar in that they each use pure tones but differ in the means of testing. Air conduction testing sends the tone to the ear through inserted earphones, while bone conduction testing uses a bone oscillator that delivers the sound through the mastoid bone, which is the bone right behind the ear, directly to the inner ear. By skipping the outer and middle ears, bone conduction testing can help narrow down the location of the hearing loss. This test is commonly known as the “beeping” test.

Word Recognition/Discrimination Tests
Since humans don’t spend most of their time listening to beeping sounds, understanding how well your auditory system processes speech is important. This is where word recognition testing is crucial – it gives us the information that is most meaningful to the patient and audiologist.

Ideally, this testing is done in the patient’s native language and uses the gold standard of recorded speech stimuli. Each ear will be assessed individually at different volumes as well as both ears together to measure the binaural advantage and rule out binaural interference. Word recognition/discrimination measurements are a key indicator of how well an individual will respond to treatment.

Impedance/Immittance Audiometry
Objective, physiologic measurements obtained from impedance/immittance equipment, like the TympStar Pro at Visalia Hearing Center, assist audiologists in analyzing the middle ear system and really narrowing down the location of your hearing loss. Tympanometry, or “the eardrum test,” acoustic reflexes, and acoustic reflex decay are the most common measurements in this section. Tympanometry is especially helpful in detecting the presence of fluid in the middle ear, in which case your hearing loss is likely temporary and easily treated by a medical doctor.

Speech-in-Noise Testing
Speech-in-noise testing, such as the QuickSIN, BKB SIN, or ACT, evaluates how well you process sound and understand speech in noisy, real-world settings. Since people with a hearing loss most often report difficulty discerning speech in a noisy environment, this assessment can help your audiologist choose the right hearing aid to best suit your hearing needs.

Additional tests, such as the TEN test, AZ-Bio, Weber/Rinne, Stenger, and/or OAEs, to name a few, may be necessary in some cases, but the measurements discussed above are the tests that are most commonly performed.

Once we’ve finished testing, we’ll show you the test results and explain them to you. If testing shows that you are experiencing hearing loss, your audiologist will explain the various treatment solutions available to address your unique type and severity of hearing challenges.

Should you test normal, your audiologist will discuss ways to protect or improve your hearing using hearing protection for work or certain activities and hobbies, as well as changes to your medications or lifestyle habits.

We value your input during this process, because to us, the foundation upon which to build a viable hearing care partnership begins with transparency and trust.