Tinnitus Evaluation- What to Expect?

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It is very much normal to be anxious about your appointment with an audiologist regarding your tinnitus evaluation. Understanding the process and what will happen can easily relieve you from uncertainty and any unwanted stress that you are going through. Tinnitus evaluation is much similar to your normal hearing evaluation. However, tinnitus evaluations tend to be longer than normal hearing evaluations, around three to four hours long.

There are mainly four steps in the whole process.

Interview with your audiologist: Firstly, the audiologist will require your medical history and background information before assessing you. Your audiologist may ask you to fill out a medical history and symptoms chart before your appointment. This is to get a brief understanding of your physical health. Medical conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, are also asked along with what other medications that you are taking at the moment, and can also ask whether you have already been diagnosed with hearing loss or not. Questions like how loud are the noise in your ear? Or is it both ears or just one? And does anything improve your symptoms? are quite common.
Audiological and Tinnitus tests and studies: You will be placed in a soundproof room wearing headphones that will transmit specific sounds into one of your ears at a time. You will now go through a series of typical hearing tests by your audiologist to determine whether your tinnitus is caused by hearing loss or anything else that is affecting your hearing. Most of the time it is because of hearing loss. Along with all these tests, there will be a few tests that are more specific to evaluating tinnitus. To know how your tinnitus sounds to you, there will be another set of tests. These tests are done to determine the pitch and the loudness of your tinnitus, keeping in mind your comfort level with sounds and at what volume and pitch it gets masked.
Diagnosis: The audiologist will now share their findings and diagnosis based on the result of the test and the pieces of information that you gave. You will be recommended for treatment if your tinnitus is linked with your hearing loss.
Treatment: Based on your results and the information that you have provided to your audiologists, treatments such as sound therapy, counselling, biofeedback, or stress therapy and drug treatment for tinnitus symptoms can be given to you.

Audiologie Centre Ouest évaluation acouphène provides you with all the specific assessments for a tinnitus evaluation.