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Hearing loss is best treated when it is still in its early stages, but in order to do this detection will have to be done first. Hearing loss can be a side effect of some disease, medication or can be caused by being exposed to loud sounds. It is very common for people to be born with hearing loss instead of acquiring it from some other means.
Hearing can be affected when some sort of sickness is able to affect the nose, mouth, ear connection. If you think you're safe when your hearing is not affected by sickness, you're wrong as the medicine you are taking might end up giving you hearing problems instead. Bumping your head is another very common way of people losing their sense of hearing.
Hearing loss can also be caused by loud decibel levels of noise pollution. Examples of this type of noise pollution are barking dogs, car alarms, industrial noise from factories and manufacturing plants. Besides the common sources of noise pollution there are also one time or rare things such as an explosion that can bursts eardrums.
No matter what causes hearing loss, the easiest way to cure it is through prevention and the only way to prevent it is by first detecting it. Hearing loss that is still fresh so to speak may still be reversed and treated by not so extreme measures. Hearing tests are the first thing a doctor will do on the patient.
Hearing tests should always include the use of an audiometer to detect a person's sensitivity to sound at different frequencies. Tests with an audiometer involve a person sitting in a soundproof booth wearing headphones that are connected to an audiometer. The audiometer is used to supply the patient inside the soundproof booth specific sound frequencies and volume.
Once the person wearing the headphones hears the sound he or she will need to acknowledge it by pressing on a button. A graph of frequency against volume will be plotted by the specialist to complete the test. The importance of this test reveals what specific sound frequencies, volume the subject has a hard time hearing and if indeed he or she has hearing loss.
The Weber and Rinne tests are two supplementary tests performed on a person, to figure out whether the person has conductive or sensorineural hearing loss. To determine what hearing loss the person is suffering from, a tuning fork is used by the tests. The Rinne test is used to determine whether a person has sensorineural or conductive hearing loss, while the Weber test simply checks to see if hearing loss is indeed present.
With the Weber test, the tuning fork is placed in the exact middle of the forehead. The patient will either hear unequal sound in the ears, which means hearing loss in one of the ears or equal sound meaning no hearing loss or equal hearing loss. Only when a person hears two different sounds can a person be sure he or she has hearing loss and asymmetric at that.
The Rinne test is administered after the conclusion of the Weber test, to find out which type of hearing loss is present. The type of hearing loss and in which ear can also be determined by the tests. Although these tests are standard practice and used by physicians and specialists alike, a proper audiometry or hearing test with an audiometer is still best.
Visit this site for further information on hearing testing. Further information on hearing screening can be found there.
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