What Does An Audiologist Do?

Audiologists are hearing experts that specialize in treating and diagnosing problems with your ears. They typically work with both adults and children and they’re well known for helping people with hearing loss by suggesting different types of hearing aids or helping their patients fit their hearing aids around their daily lives.

Audiologists are still somewhat of a mystery to most people, so here are a couple of key points to help you understand what exactly an audiologist does and how they fit into the healthcare ecosystem.

Audiologists evaluate and treat hearing problems

Whether it’s hearing loss due to an exposure to loud noises or tinnitus with serious underlying symptoms, audiologists specialize in evaluating problems with your ears and helping you treat certain issues. In most cases, audiologists will help you by diagnosing the severity of our hearing loss (no matter how severe) and will typically offer you hearing aids to help amplify the noises around you to make it easier for you to hear. This is what most audiologists are known for and it’s the most common reason for wanting to go see one.

Audiologists help you fit your hearing aids

Audiologists are also well-known for helping their patients with hearing aid fittings. This includes helping their patients with the tuning of the amplification of their hearing aids and ensuring that they fit comfortably. Hearing aids will often be worn for long periods of time, hence why it’s important for them to fit pleasantly in or around your ear. There are many different types of hearing aids too, and audiologists are expected to make recommendations based on the lifestyles and wants of their patients.

Audiologists help find the underlying issues of tinnitus symptoms

Tinnitus is a symptom that is commonly described as being a mild to loud ringing or high-pitched whine in your ear. Tinnitus itself is a symptom of an underlying issue such as hearing loss, and audiologists are trained in the field of diagnosing the problems that could result in tinnitus. They inspect the entire ear and examine the insides with specialized tools that help them paint a bigger picture of what the condition of your ear is like. Using this information, they piece together the problems regarding your ear and diagnose you much like any other examination.

Audiologists deal with language disorders

In addition to just the ears, audiologists also help patients with language disorders. Audiologists also work in the field of speech-language pathology. This essentially means that they assess and treat speech-language related issues in both children and adults. Whether it’s dealing with common speech disorders that result in the patient being unable to make speech sounds properly or social communication disorders where patients have trouble communicating in verbal or non-verbal manners, an audiologist can train under many different medical disciplines.