While trouble understanding speech in background noise is the #1 complaint for most listeners with hearing loss, seldom do listeners receive testing in background noise. Sometimes the reason you're NOT tested in background noise is that the clinic doesn't want to take the time to do the testing. "Why do a test that we can't get paid for?" Mostly this comes from medicare's reluctance to reimburse for speech in noise, SPIN, testing. If you are on medicare, you know that Medicare is continuing to reduce the amount of money they pay providers every year. In fact, in our community many physicians are refusing to accept medicare assignment. They don't want a government administrator telling them how to their job and you shouldn't either.
We don't think that Medicare should be the one telling us how to do our job. In fact, we would NEVER omit a test just because Medicare won't pay for it! We believe the SPIN test battery is the most important series of tests you receive when complaining of difficulty understanding speech in noise.
When doing speech in noise testing, we learn several things:
With so much valuable information to be learned by SPIN testing, why wouldn't we do it? Rest assured we will always do SPIN testing if we think it will help you. After all, isn't that why you came to us.