Why You Shouldn’t Use Cotton Swabs to Clean Your Ears

in health •  7 years ago 

Have you ever been tempted to clean out your ears (or your children’s ears) with cotton swabs? Experts have one word of advice: don’t!

Earwax (cerumen) is supposed to be in your ears. It has a mission: to keep your ears healthy by trapping dust and dirt so that they don’t travel deeper into your ear. Having a waxy coating on your delicate ear canal skin also helps to protect it. The inside of your ear doesn’t need to be cleaned because earwax is the cleaner.

A young girl wincing as she cleans her ear with a cotton swab.

Your body already has a way to deal with earwax it no longer needs. Chewing, other jaw movements, and skin growing inside your ear will push old earwax out naturally. Using cotton swabs, however, can push the wax deeper into your ear canal. You might also seriously damage sensitive ear canal skin or your eardrum.

Earwax buildup is not very common. According to the American Academy of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery (link is external), just 1 in 10 children and 1 in 20 adults have this problem. Some people may be more susceptible to earwax build up. About 3 in 10 elderly adults and developmentally disabled adults might have more of a problem with earwax.

Signs of too much earwax or earwax that is stuck and blocking the ear canal include:

Pain or itching
A feeling that your ear is full
Ringing in the ear (tinnitus)
Hearing loss (or a change in how well hearing aids work, for those who use them)
Odor or discharge

If you have any of these symptoms, see a doctor or other health care provider.

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This post was flagged to be hidden by the troller 'low raters' who are reporting your posts making them hiddenh.png! :
https://steemit.com/@kabir88

What kind of troll is harassing you! People like that are disgusting.

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Joe
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This troll is https://steemit.com/@kabir88 Feel free to flag him ^_^

Thanks for your upvote! Upvoted you!

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  ·  7 years ago (edited)

When did I become a troll?

Steemit is a network where we are all allowed to post and react to other people's post.

When you copy and paste cheap articles from the internet onto steemit, you bring down the quality of content here (in my view) and therefore I flag cheap/spammy content (which I have the right to do).

If you want to escalate this by getting others to flag my posts in retaliation, good luck to you.

But that's not the way I operate and if people come to flag my posts purely because you want to protect your spam, then they should be ashamed too

Thanks for tagging me, reminded me to come and flag this post