Why is a Regular Hearing Screening Important?

Hearing loss is one of the most common conditions in adults. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, around 36-million Americans experience hearing loss.  However, it is often possible to prevent hearing loss by taking care of yourself and your hearing. The best way to prevent hearing loss is to avoid noisy places, wear earplugs when necessary and make sure you receive regular hearing screenings. This article will discuss why it’s essential to have regular hearing screenings and how they can help manage your condition.

The Importance of Regular Screenings

One of the most important reasons why it’s essential to have regular hearing screenings is to detect hearing loss early. Hearing loss often has no symptoms. As a result, it can be difficult to know that you’ve been experiencing a decline in hearing abilities without regular screenings. You could catch hearing loss issues before they worsen by having a routine hearing test.

If you wait until the problem becomes more severe, it will be more challenging to treat. For example, if you think your hearing has started to worsen but haven’t had a hearing screening yet, treatment might not be as effective as it would be if you had discovered it earlier. Waiting for this long only makes the hearing loss harder to treat.

In addition, by having regular screenings, you could find out how much hearing damage has occurred and what steps need to be taken for your condition to improve. If you know what has been affected and which treatments are necessary for your condition, you can progress towards recovery. In other words, an audiogram with regular screenings can help answer these questions and provide guidance on how best to manage your condition.

Symptoms To Watch Out For

If you’ve noticed any of the following symptoms, you may have hearing loss:

• Tinnitus, or a ringing in your ears
• Dizziness
• A feeling that there is always background noise
• Not being able to understand people at a distance
• Having difficulty hearing when in a group of people
• Having trouble understanding speech on TV or phone conversations

If you experience any of these symptoms, it’s vital to visit a hearing instrument specialist (HIS). They can either diagnose or rule out hearing loss. If they do confirm that you have hearing loss, they’ll be able to help you manage it.

How Often Should You Get Screened?

It’s not easy to know if we have hearing loss. It often goes unnoticed until we start noticing the effects. But the earliest stage of hearing loss is the easiest to manage, so it’s essential to get screened regularly. One of the best ways to do that is by seeing a HIS every six months for a routine hearing screening and telling them about any symptoms you may be experiencing. The American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery recommends every three years for adults under age 65 and yearly for those over 65.

What Happens at A Hearing Screening?

A hearing screen is a test you can have done to check your hearing. If there’s no sign of hearing loss, then you don’t need to worry about it for now. But if the result indicates hearing loss, you should follow up with your and explore different treatment options.

Hearing screenings are often quick and easy. The test administrator will ask you to identify sounds in quiet and noisy settings. To help with the screening, they may also ask you to clap or make some other sound that would be representative of what you hear on a day-to-day basis.

If there’s any sign of hearing loss, then they will recommend that you discuss the necessary treatment for your hearing loss and the necessary steps to take in the future. You might be wondering why it’s essential to have regular screenings if they only indicate a problem after the fact? Well, there are two reasons:

• A hearing screening test identifies problems before they get worse and limits the amount of damage done which saves time and resources trying to fix them later on.
• It can help reassure people who were too afraid to go into a clinic or hospital because they feared eardrum pulling or other invasive procedures that no such thing would happen during a screening appointment.

It’s essential to keep your ears healthy with regular screenings. If you think you might need a hearing screening, schedule an appointment with a HIS today.  If you want to learn more about combatting hearing loss, visit Affordable Hearing online or call us today at Irmo: 803-749-6017 and Orangeburg + Santee: 803-531-6403.