How to fail a va hearing test
How to FAKE a Hearing Loss During A Hearing Test
Timecodes:
In this video, I'm gonna share the six things
that you must know before trying to fake a hearing loss
during a hearing test.
Coming up.
(new age music)
Hey guys, Cliff Olson, doctor of audiology
and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions in Anthem, Arizona.
On this channel, I cover a bunch of
hearing related information to help make you
a better informed consumer.
So, if you're into that,
make sure you hit that subscribe button
and don't forget to click the bell to receive
a notification every time I post a new video.
Now, there are a variety of reasons why you may be
thinking of faking a hearing loss during a hearing test.
Whether you're trying to get compensation
from the military or from a workman's comp claim
or maybe you're just trying to get out of school
or just get some attention,
but there are six things that you must know
before attempting to trick a hearing care professional
who's been specifically trained to determine
whether or not your hearing loss is real.
The first thing is the pure tone test.
This is the part of the hearing test
where the hearing care professional
will play beeps to you and you'll actually
raise your hands or click a button
to let them know that you've heard that sound.
The hearing care professional is gonna test you
at a bunch of different frequencies.
The problem is is that they constantly fluctuate
between different intensity levels
and if you're not extremely consistent
with indicating which beep you can actually hear,
they're gonna know right off that bat
that something is fishy.
Now, if you're thinking that, you know what,
I'm just not gonna raise my hand
for any beeps that I hear in one particular ear
and fake a unilateral hearing loss,
your hearing care professional will perform
a Stenger test which will actually identify
whether or not you're faking a hearing loss
in that one ear and that test is impossible to beat.
If, by some chance, you're able to respond consistently
to pure tone testing and the hearing care professional
doesn't see anything suspicious,
then you have to get past the second part of testing,
which is the speech reception threshold or SRTs.
The whole purpose of SRTs is to determine
if the pure tone test results were reliable,
so if you end up having pure tone thresholds here
and a speech reception threshold down here,
they're gonna know that things don't match up
and that's a clear indicator
that there's some faking going on.
And again, just like pure tone testing,
faking an SRT to match up with your pure tone average
is extremely difficult.
The third part is word recognition testing.
This is the part of the test when words are presented
to you at a fully audible level
and you're expected to repeat those words
back to the tester.
In sense, the hearing care professional
knows that they're playing them at a level
that you can most definitely hear even with a hearing loss,
they're expecting you to repeat these back accurately.
And now that you know that you should
be able to hear these words even with
the hearing loss you've been faking
through the previous portion of the hearing test,
you can't just not say anything.
That's a dead giveaway that you're actually
faking a hearing loss,
so you're gonna have to actually repeat back
some kind of words that are close to the words
that are given to you, but not exactly those words
and that is extremely difficult to do.
By this point, 99.9% of hearing care professionals
have already been able to identify
that you are faking your hearing loss,
but they still need to do some additional testing
to indicate inside of the record
that you are, in fact, faking.
This leads me to number four,
which is they're going to do auditory reflex testing on you.
You have three sections of your ear,
you have the outer ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear.
In the middle ear, you have three bones called
the malleus, the incus, and the stapes
that transfer sound from your ear drum
to your inner ear, which is the cochlea.
Attached to the malleus is the tensor tympani muscle
and attached to the stapes you have the stapedius muscle.
When sounds are presented to your ears,
and at certain intensity levels, these two muscles contract
and this contraction is measured
by your hearing care professional.
This indicates that your inner ear was stimulated
by the these sounds and is responding accordingly
with the reflex reaction, which strongly suggests
that you're actually able to hear that sound.
This reflex is impossible to prevent,
so there's nothing that you can do
to basically stop it from happening.
It's just like when a doctor will tap on your knee
with that little rubber instrument
when you're in the doctor's office
and it will make your leg jump.
The same thing is happening, just inside of your ear.
When these reflexes don't match up
with the prior testing that you did that was voluntary,
it's going to indicate to the hearing care professional,
again, that you are faking your hearing loss.
Let's just say that you don't have
a stapedius muscle inside of your middle ear.
They're still gonna take and do additional testing on you
in the form of otoacoustic emissions or OAEs.
This is another involuntary evaluation
that your hearing care professional
will perform on you at this point
where they will present sound to your inner ear
and your inner ear is going to, again,
emit a sound back that they can actually measure
to determine if your hearing organ is functioning properly.
If, by some chance, at this point,
you were still adamant that you have a hearing loss,
your hearing care profession still has
one trick up their sleeves
and this is called the auditory brainstem response.
This is another involuntary test
where you will actually have electrodes
hooked up to your head, you will sit in a dark room,
they will present sounds to you,
and they will measure your brain activity.
If your brain actually hears the sound,
we will see it on our computer screen
in the form of a spike.
If your brain does not hear the sound,
all it will give us is a flat line.
Even though it is impossible
to fake a hearing loss and get away with it,
there is one occasion where I do believe it's okay
to make an attempt and that is if you need help.
I'm not talking help with your hearing,
I'm talking about help with depression or abuse.
If you are faking a hearing loss
in order to make a cry for help,
then I highly recommend that you do so
so your hearing care professional
can actually get you some help.
However, if you are going to fake a hearing loss
for the purpose of gaining compensation
in some for or another,
then I highly recommend that you stay home
and let your hearing care professional
actually help people who need it.
That's it for this video.
If you have any questions,
leave them in the comments section below.
If you like the video, please share it,
and if you wanna see other videos just like this one,
go ahead and hit that subscribe button.
I'll see you next time.
(new age music)
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