Have you ever purchased something that required assembly and upon opening the box, you discovered that the directions appeared to be written in a foreign language?
If so, you probably felt your blood pressure rise as you were forced to face the reality that the project was not going to be as easy as you hoped it would be.
We become justifiably frustrated in situations like this because we know there has to be a simpler way of explaining things. After all, what good are directions if you can’t understand them?
And when it comes to our health, we want and need things to be explained to us in a way that makes sense. The last thing you should have to do when receiving test results is to try and decipher some sort of secret code.
In the case of your hearing test results, there is a very simple way to understand your results and it’s called an Audiogram.
An Audiogram is a chart that shows the results of your hearing test. Your hearing test results are plotted on a graph and then compared with that of a person with normal levels of hearing.
Here is one sample of an Audiogram:
The red line shows the level of hearing of a person’s right ear. The left ear is plotted with a blue line (not shown here). The area below the line shows the levels of hearing loss that this person can hear and the area above the line shows the levels that the person can’t hear.
The Audiogram very clearly shows what frequencies you can hear and the volume you can hear them at.
In other words, they will help you figure out why you keep missing your friends phone calls but you seem to have no problem noticing that someone left the water running in the next room.
Here is another sample of an Audiogram with common sounds plotted out
In order to analyze this data, Audiologists use something known as “the speech banana”. The speech banana looks something like this:
Plotted against a hearing loss, the speech banana shows which sounds in every day speech you’re missing.
All of this information is especially important because hearing professionals use it as a tool for fitting hearing aids.
If you think you may be experiencing hearing loss, particularly if you seem to be able to hear certain noises but not others, now is the time to get your hearing tested and to see what your Audiogram reveals.
Why miss out on the full range of sounds this life has to offer when you may not have to?
We refuse to settle for less than the best and we hope you will do the same.
