At Hearing Health Clinic, we do a functional hearing evaluation instead of just a traditional standard hearing test. What’s the difference? A standard hearing test is going to be those beeps when you go in the booth. And that’s an important part, because that tells us how loud sound has to be at different pitches for your ears to pick it up. Because that’s step number one in hearing: your ears have to pick up the sound.

But that’s not the end of hearing. After your ears pick up the sound, that signal is sent on up to the brain, and the brain has to make sense out of that. So our entire auditory system is ear to brain, and that’s how we hear in our day-to-day lives. We don’t walk around and hear beep beeps all day. So while that’s an important part of the test, that can’t be the end of the test.

We actually need to know: how are you hearing in noise? How do you tolerate noise? What kind of effort does it take for you to be able to have a conversation, especially in noisy places? Things like that are really important, and that beep beep test doesn’t tell us that. Or “repeat these words in quiet.” That doesn’t tell us that.

So a functional hearing evaluation tells me how you function in day-to-day life with your entire auditory system. And that is so valuable for me, because that gives me your auditory profile and tells me what you need. And if you need hearing aids, what specific brand of hearing aid would be best for you, and how to optimally fit that hearing aid.

So a functional hearing evaluation is a two-hour evaluation. It is so much more than the beep beep test, and it is really valuable.