Most responsible adults try to make at least a decent effort at seeing a doctor every year for a check-up. Whether it’s getting one’s teeth cleaned to prevent the expenses of filling cavities and having root canals later, or regular physicals that help catch more serious problems before they become inoperable, having a good relationship with your doctor and being diligent enough to schedule appointments is very important.

One part of the body often gets ignored when it’s time to improve one’s health, and yet that part of the body is responsible for a staggering amount of input every day, much of which is how we manage to navigate the world. Yet hearing problems take a much longer time to get most people to a doctor, because they don’t register as urgently as something else might.

Though having trouble with hearing might not start out as a priority, if things move past a certain point, it definitely will become one. As always, prevention is much better than a cure, and one of the best ways to prevent needing a lot of assistance with hearing is to be sure to have yearly hearing exams.

Hearing evaluations are short and relatively simple medical exams that consisted of a series of different tests that are minimally invasive and test your abilities to still decipher different parts of speech. By doing this, doctors are able to determine in what ways your hearing has started to change or diminish. There is the pure tone test, where you listen to tones on headphones, with doctors able to pinpoint the sort of hearing loss you are experiencing based on which tones you can hear and which tones you cannot.

The whisper test involves simply listening to whispering to see how well you can distinguish what is being said if someone speaks to you quietly. Part of the whisper test also involves having a conversation while there is a din in the background that is slightly loud. Before any of these hearing loss tests are administered, though, doctors usually do a quick and painless examination of your ears, which often will determine that the actual trouble is simply a bit of blockage due to excessive earwax build-up, or sometimes more rarely, some sort of ear-related injury.

Sometimes, to better understand what may have caused hearing loss, more elaborate tests are done, but these are also painless and relatively fast and easy. Doctors often used otoacoustic emissions testing, which essentially is a way of measuring one’s inner ear and how it is responding to sound. More importantly, the test allows doctors to see how the inner ear is communicating sound to the rest of the ear, which is often a helpful way of determining where exactly problems are occurring in the scheme of things.

While a yearly hearing exam is a good idea for anyone concerned about health issues, it is of particular importance to see a doctor immediately after being exposed to any sort of seriously loud or traumatizing sound. This is even more important for parents of young children, who might have accidentally had their hearing put in harm’s way by being exposed to loud noise. It is also important during a hearing exam to give a comprehensive list of any medications you may be taking, as certain medicines do often have the side effects of creating a sense of vertigo, as well as the unfortunate side effect of sometimes causing a ringing in one’s ears. Sometimes fixing trouble with hearing can be as simple as changing medicines.