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There are a lot of things in this world that can cause hearing loss and the first step to treating it is detecting it in the first place. One of the ways of getting hearing loss is by living in a noisy place like near an airport or a construction yard. A person can also be born with hearing disabilities if he or she has been found out to have malfunctioning and abnormal hearing parts.

A person’s hearing as mentioned, can be affected by illnesses or certain diseases as well. Besides illnesses another thing that can cause loss of hearing is taking certain medication known to affect hearing like aspirin. Hearing impairment can also be caused by injuries to the head or spinal area.

Another cause of hearing loss that can be said to be the most common is losing your sense of hearing gradually in environments of continuous noise pollution. This can be the constant loud noise that you hear everyday, for example living near an airport or a freeway. Noise pollution that are not very common are the sounds coming from ammunition or gunshots.

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. Knowing about the hearing disorder early, gives doctors more flexibility when it comes to time to study and treat the ears with not so extreme measures. The only way to detect hearing problems is by performing hearing tests on the person.

An audiologist uses an audiometer to diagnose a person’s hearing sensitivity to sounds at different frequencies. The patient will be seated in a soundproof booth wearing headphones connected to an audiometer. The audiologist then operates the audiometer and makes the patient hear sounds at different levels and frequencies.

The subject inside the booth, upon hearing the tone will usually acknowledge hearing the tone by pressing on a button. More than one sound is tested and a graph is plotted out by the audio specialist. 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.

An audtiometry test is not sufficient to figure out the real problem a person is having, but with the use of the Rinne and Weber test, the type of hearing loss can be determined. To determine what hearing loss the person is suffering from, a tuning fork is used by the tests. Weber tests can check if a person has hearing loss but not the type, while the Rinne test can determine which type and in what ear.

For the Weber test to work properly, a tuning fork is placed equidistant from the right and left ears. When a person hears the sound coming from the tuning fork is the same in both ears, then it can be concluded the person either has no hearing loss or the same in both ears. A person can have asymmetric hearing loss if the subject does not hear the same sound in both ears.

After the Weber test, the Rinne test is performed to find out if the person has conductive hearing loss or sensorineural. The tests are also used to figure out which ear has which type of hearing loss. These two tests coupled with the audiometry test can also make the diagnostic more accurate.

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