At Santa Fe Ear, Nose & Throat, our audiologist appointments typically begin with your provider asking about your hearing. Our team will ask about situations that seem to contribute to your hearing difficulties. This is how we get an idea of how to help you gain back your hearing
Because most hearing loss is progressive, the sooner it’s diagnosed, the more successful treatment will be.
Taking this step will not just improve your hearing—it will help you connect more deeply with the people in your life and the places you call home.
How Hearing Works
Sound and speech information travels as the energy of a sound wave.
The soundwave travels down your auditory canal to the eardrum (tympanic membrane), where the energy of the soundwave moves the eardrum back and forth.
The movement of the eardrum is then ‘concentrated’ by the movement of the hearing bones (malleus, incus, stapes) down to the inner ear.
Inside the inner ear, the movement of the hearing bones stimulates the hair cells. These hair cells can convert the energy of a sound wave into neural signals that the brain uses to hear.
Symptoms of Hearing Loss
- Family or friends have remarked on your hearing.
- People seem to mumble, or you often need them to repeat themselves.
- You have trouble following conversations in groups, especially with background noise.
- Telephone conversations are difficult to follow.
- Others comment on the volume when you listen to the TV or music.
Hearing Loss Risk Factors
- Noise exposure, including work-related noise exposure, use of guns without hearing protection and exposure to loud music
- Age. 30% of people older than 60 will have hearing loss
- Family history
- Health conditions, including acute illnesses or trauma, poorly controlled diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol
- Outer ear canal conditions, such as recurrent earwax impactions and chronic eczema of the ear canal skin, create recurring problems with sound waves reaching the eardrum.
- Inner Ear conditions, such as viral infections that cause the sudden loss of hearing, certain autoimmune diseases and an inner ear condition called Meniere’s Syndrome that is associated with progressive hearing loss and episodes of a severe spinning sensation (vertigo), all can cause permanent loss of the ‘hair cells’ in the inner ear.
- Difficulty in the brain’s processing of sound waves. The ear takes the energy of sound waves and creates nerve energy for the brain to use – but it’s really the brain that ‘hears and understands’ the information present in the sound wave of speech, music, a car horn, or doorbell.
Understanding Your Audiogram
An audiogram is a key part of diagnosing your hearing loss. For adults, the audiogram is a graph that represents individual sound frequencies used in speech, compared with the Hearing Level (decibels) at which speech must be heard.
For patients younger than five, other types of audiograms are used.
On an adult audiogram, you can:
- Notice the frequencies of familiar sounds in our environment compared to how loud they usually are in our day-to-day activities. For instance, a loud rock-and-roll band is at 120 decibels.
- Notice the frequencies of individual speech sounds… f, s, and the sounds are consonant sounds of speech at the ‘higher’ frequency of 4,000 Hz and usually ‘quiet’ decibel level of 20 dB.
- Notice the grey shaded ‘speech banana’ that represents the frequency and hearing level for normal human conversation. This speech banana is what we use to compare with your own audiogram.
This is an actual audiogram from our office showing normal hearing. Note the markings for the right ear (O) and the left ear (X). It shows how loud the sounds and speech need to be for you to hear them at speech frequencies.
Another important addition to the audiogram is ‘Speech Discrimination’. This is a measure of how well your brain understands speech.
Lastly, note the markings of Normal, Mild, Moderate, Moderate-to-Severe, Severe and Profound on the left side of the graft. These represent the ‘Levels of Hearing Loss’ present for everyday sounds and speech.
Take the Next Steps to Better Hearing
Whether it’s hearing aids or another treatment, our providers can help with whatever auditory problem you’re facing. Soon enough, you’ll be able to hear some of the sounds you’ve been missing.
We want you to live life to the fullest, and that means not missing conversations with family, friends or coworkers. At Santa Fe Ear, Nose & Throat, you have specialists in your corner who are ready to help you hear everything your world has to offer. Schedule an appointment today.
Call Santa Fe Ear, Nose & Throat for more information or to schedule an appointment.