Audiology

Hearing Loss & Hearing Aids

When you have trouble hearing or experience ringing in your ears, daily life can become difficult and frustrating. Our audiologists use state-of-the-art technology to diagnose hearing disorders and provide personalized and attentive service to help you hear more clearly. For hearing loss testing and treatment, including hearing aids, see the audiology team at Specialty Physician Associates at one of our locations in Allentown, Bethlehem, Quakertown, or Wind Gap.

To schedule a hearing test, contact us today.

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Hearing Loss & Hearing Aids Q & A

What Causes Hearing Loss?

Hearing loss affects more than 15% of adults in the United States and can make daily life extremely difficult. Common causes of hearing loss include:

Advancing age
Certain medications
Head trauma or injury to the head or ears
Genetic factors
Prolonged exposure to loud noises
Certain illnesses, including mumps, Meniere’s disease, and otosclerosis
An acoustic neuroma (a type of tumor that affects the acoustic nerve)

Hearing loss is generally categorized into problems with sensing sound due to nerve problems or problems conducting sound due to mechanical issues in the outer or middle ear. You could experience a combination of the two, depending on your diagnosis.

What are the Signs of Hearing Loss?

Symptoms of hearing loss can vary depending on the cause and severity of your hearing loss. Possible signs of hearing loss include:

Difficulty understanding everyday conversations
Feeling like you can hear but can’t understand what you’re hearing
Having to turn up the sound on your TV or radio
Often asking other people to repeat what they’re saying
Avoiding social situations due to hearing difficulties
Difficulty communicating in noisy environments
Tinnitus, which causes ringing or buzzing in your ears

In most cases, hearing loss occurs gradually and you might not notice it until you have a significant loss that requires treatment.

How is Hearing Loss Diagnosed?

Diagnosis of a hearing loss involves simple and painless testing at Specialty Physician Associates. After discussing your symptoms and hearing difficulties with your doctor, your doctor examines your ears with a tool called an otoscope. Your doctor looks for signs of infection or earwax build up that might be contributing to your hearing loss. You’ll then complete a series of hearing tests while wearing headphones or sitting in a sound booth. Your doctor plays a series of sounds at different volumes and tones and asks you to note when you hear each sound. Based on your results, your doctor determines your diagnosis and what treatments can help you.

How is Hearing Loss Treated?

The most common treatment of hearing loss is hearing aids. Hearing aids are tiny microphones worn inside your ears that amplify the sounds around you. There are many different styles and sizes of hearing aids based on your budget and lifestyle. Discuss your options with your doctor to determine which type of hearing aid is best for you. To schedule a hearing test at Specialty Physician Associates, call today.

Hearing Aid Brands

Below are the hearing aid companies we work with. Please note not every location services every manufacturer.

Cochlear Implants

Cochlear implants offer hope to children and adults with moderate to profound hearing loss, giving them the ability to perceive sound and understand speech. The team at Specialty Physician Associates offers you the full range of cochlear implant services, including your first evaluation and expert surgical implantation to help you learn to hear using the device. To schedule an appointment, contact one of our convenient Pennsylvania locations today.

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Cochlear Implants Q&A

What is a Cochlear Implant?

A cochlear implant is a small electronic device that helps to restore hearing in patients with severe hearing loss. Hearing aids amplify sound coming into the ear, but a cochlear implant is different: It bypasses the ear to deliver sounds to the auditory nerve.

Cochlear implants contain four parts:

Microphone: Captures sounds and transmits them to the speech processor
Speech processor: Selects and arranges the sounds it receives
Transmitter and receiver: Convert sound signals into electric impulses
Electrodes: Receive the electrical impulses and send them to the auditory nerve

As your brain receives the signals through the auditory nerve, it translates them into the sound you hear. When you have a cochlear implant, the sounds won’t be like normal sounds. However, it only takes time and training from the team at Specialty Physician Associates to teach you how to interpret the sounds.

Who Can Receive a Cochlear Implant?

Our Audiologists will evaluate and determine if cochlear implants are an option for you. Children and adults may receive cochlear implants when they have sensorineural hearing loss. This type of deafness occurs when the cells or nerves in your inner ear are damaged. The device is approved for children as young as 12 months of age. Cochlear implants are also extremely beneficial when they’re implanted while young children are learning speech and language skills.

You may be eligible for cochlear implants if you meet the following criteria:

Your hearing loss is severe enough to affect spoken communication
You get little to no benefit from hearing aids
You don’t have a medical condition that might affect cochlear implants

It’s also important to be motivated to stick with your rehabilitation sessions as you learn how to recognize the sounds transmitted through the cochlear implant.

How is a Cochlear Implant Inserted?

While you wear the microphone and processor over your ear, the rest of the device is surgically implanted. Your doctor at Specialty Physician Associates makes a slight depression in an area of your skull, which is where the transmitter and receiver are placed.

After making a small hole in the inner ear at the cochlea, your doctor guides the electrodes from the receiver to the nerve. Your cochlear implants won’t be turned on until 2-6 weeks after surgery, so the incision has time to heal.

Chronic Ear & Hearing Surgery

When an ear infection doesn’t heal, it can turn into a chronic ear problem that affects your hearing, causes complications like cysts, and often requires surgery. The ear, nose, and throat team at Specialty Physician Associates has extensive experience performing the surgeries required to heal chronic ear problems and to restore your hearing by reconstructing damaged bones. If you or your child experiences ongoing ear pain, schedule an appointment by calling one of the offices in Allentown, Bethlehem, Quakertown, or Wind Gap.

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Chronic Ear & Hearing Surgery Q&A

What is Chronic Ear Disease?

Chronic ear disease usually refers to two conditions:

Chronic Otitis Media (Middle Ear Infection): Ear infections usually clear up on their own. For some patients, however, the infection doesn’t heal. Instead, it turns into a long-lasting problem called chronic otitis media. Chronic infections often occur when the eustachian tube becomes blocked and fluids build up. When a chronic infection goes untreated, it can slowly erode the bones in your middle ear or cause an abscess behind the ear called mastoiditis. The infection may spread to your inner ear, where it can cause hearing loss and, in severe cases, it can affect your facial nerves or brain.
Cholesteatoma: A cholesteatoma is an overgrowth of skin or a cyst that develops behind your eardrum. As the cholesteatoma slowly enlarges, it may damage small bones in your ear and cause dizziness or hearing loss. A cholesteatoma may also grow to involve facial nerves or your brain.

What Symptoms Develop Due to Chronic Ear Problems?

Ear pain
Ear drainage
Facial muscle weakness
Dizziness or loss of balance
Difficulty hearing or hearing loss
Feeling of fullness or pressure in your ear

A cholesteatoma may cause an ache behind your ear that’s especially noticeable at night. When children develop chronic ear infections, parents often notice other symptoms such as difficulty sleeping, ear tugging, crying, and being more irritable than normal.

What Types of Surgery Treat Chronic Ear and Hearing Problems?

The treatment options for chronic otitis media differ from those for cholesteatoma:

Chronic Otitis Media: To relieve a chronic ear infection, your doctor performs surgery, creating a small hole in the eardrum, then suctioning out the excess fluid, and placing a small tube in the opening. The tube keeps the middle ear ventilated and prevents fluids from accumulating. Some ear tubes stay in place 6-12 months before falling out on their own; others stay in longer and must be surgically removed. Complications caused by chronic otitis media require additional surgical procedures. For example, the doctors at Specialty Physician Associates may reconstruct bones damaged by the infection or drain an abscess.
Cholesteatoma: The only way to eliminate a cholesteatoma is with surgery to remove the cyst and eliminate infection. Your surgery may include procedures to restore your hearing by reconstructing the bones, eardrum, and other parts of your ear damaged by the cholesteatoma.

Dizziness & Balance Disorders

A balance disorder is a condition that causes dizziness, a feeling of lightheadedness, or other types of disorientation. The leading ENT team in the Lehigh Valley area, Specialty Physician Associates, are balance-disorder experts who can help with vertigo, Meniere’s disease, inner ear problems, or other causes of dizziness and related issues. In some cases of Ménière's disease or acoustic neuroma, your ENT doctor might recommend surgery. Call one of the five convenient offices in Allentown, Bethlehem, Quakertown, or Wind Gap.

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Dizziness & Balance Disorders Q&A

What are Balance Disorders?

What Causes Balance Disorders?

Normal balance requires all of your body's various systems functioning properly and in unison, so if you have an issue with just one system it can throw off your balance considerably. The majority of balance disorders come from inner ear problems (your vestibular system). Medication reactions can also cause balance issues.

Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, one of the most common balance disorders and the leading cause of vertigo, happens when otoconia, small calcium crystals, dislodge in your ear.

Acoustic neuroma is caused by a tumor on a nerve that regulates hearing and balance.

The cause of Ménière's disease, a balance disorder that causes serious sudden vertigo and sometimes other problems like hearing loss and inner-ear buzzing or ringing, isn't known.

What is the Treatment for Balance Disorders?

Treatment of balance disorders starts with identifying its underlying cause whenever possible. Usually, this means diagnosing a specific vestibular system problem through comprehensive testing.

After diagnosis, your doctor could recommend options such as:

Head positioning maneuvers to move otoconia out of the wrong position in your ear
Balance retraining exercises
Dietary changes
Medical devices to aid balance, such as canes
Prescription medication for dizziness, nausea, migraines, or anxiety
Antibiotic injections to stop the affected ear from regulating balance so the other ear takes over

Tinnitus

If you hear ringing even when there’s no noise at all, you could be suffering from tinnitus. This common issue affects up to 20% of all men and women today, and for many sufferers, it’s distracting and frustrating enough to affect your quality of life. The team of expert ENT doctors at Specialty Physician Associates in Allentown, Bethlehem, Quakertown, or Wind Gap can help you overcome tinnitus so you can put that ringing behind you. Call the office closest to you to book now.

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Tinnitus Q&A

What is Tinnitus?

Tinnitus means that you hear ringing or other persistent noises. Tinnitus is a symptom rather than a condition of its own. If you suffer from tinnitus, you might hear very intrusive noise, very soft noise, or anything in between.

Tinnitus is usually sporadic but it can be continuous. Tinnitus is categorized in two general ways: subjective and objective.

Subjective Tinnitus: By far the most frequently occurring kind of tinnitus, subjective tinnitus causes ringing or other noises that only you can hear. It's usually directly related to ear problems like age-related hearing loss, but can also be connected to auditory nerve problems in the part of your brain that processes nerve signals as noise. Certain medications can cause tinnitus, too.
Objective Tinnitus: Objective tinnitus is unique and rare because your doctor can hear the ringing or other noise when they examine your ears. Circulatory system issues like atherosclerosis or vascular malformations can cause objective tinnitus as can inner ear muscle spasms.

Regardless of what kind of tinnitus you have, your Specialty Physician Associates doctor can diagnose the problem and prescribe effective treatment.

How Can I Recognize Tinnitus?

What is the Treatment for Tinnitus?

Because tinnitus is a symptom itself, your Specialty Physician Associates doctor works to uncover its root cause. For example, if you have sinusitis, the resultant middle ear pressure could trigger tinnitus. By treating the sinusitis, the tinnitus stops.

Although there’s no FDA-approved tinnitus medication yet, depression and anxiety medications appear to help in some cases.

Treatment can include many different things, depending on the cause and your symptoms:

Hearing aid for age-related hearing loss
Inner-ear masking devices that issue soft white noise
Neuromonics® sound therapy that reprograms your brain to decrease tinnitus
White noise devices for your home

Ear, Nose and Throat, Allergy and Immunology, Audiology & Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery located in Allentown, Bethlehem, Quakertown & Wind Gap, PA

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