Do you often find yourself reaching for a cotton bud to “clean” your ears? Do you think that ear wax is dirty and should be removed as often as possible? If you answered ‘yes’ to those questions, you could actually be doing more harm than good to your ears.
One of the most common ear complications every ENT specialist sees is earwax impaction. In simplest terms, earwax impaction occurs when a lot of wax builds up close to the eardrum and hardens causing pain, blockage, hearing loss, ringing in the ears and discharge.
And cotton buds are a common cause of such impaction. Each time you push a cotton bud far into your ear, you remove only some of wax, while more of it gets pushed deeper into the ear canal. Besides, there is also the risk of causing an infection by scratching the sensitive skin of the ear canal, or even damaging the ear drum. While using the ear bud for the outer ear is fine, we often tend to go all the way in, posing a risk.
Self-cleansing mechanism
As Dr Krishna Kumar, Senior ENT Specialist at Apollo Hospitals points out, there is actually no need to clean our ears. “Normally, the ears are self-cleansing. Researchers have shown that wax constantly migrates outwards. But when people put buds into their ears regularly, they keep pushing the wax back in.”
As the wax accumulates, he goes on to explain, it can harden and, in extreme cases, lead to keratosis, where the accumulated wax sticks to skin lining the ear canal. “At that stage, it becomes very painful, and the patient would require anaesthesia to remove the accumulated wax,” says Dr Krishna Kumar.
According to guidelines of the American Academy of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, roughly one in 10 children and one in 20 adults suffer from excessive build-up of earwax. For such patients, it’s necessary to visit an ENT specialist to remove the wax through manual scraping, syringing warm water into the ears, and suction. But all of these should be carried out by a trained doctor, and should not be attempted at home.
Avoid water and oil too
Besides cotton buds, another major myth about ears is the belief that the ear canal should be regularly washed with water or treated with oil when blocks occur. However, says Dr Krishna Kumar, both water and oil can also cause further problems. “If there is wax build-up in the ears, water will cause the wax to swell. If people are prone to fungal infections, these infections thrive in a moist atmosphere. And if there is a hole in the eardrum, water going in can start a cycle of pus discharge,” he explains. As far as possible, he adds, one should avoid getting water in the ears by wearing swimmer’s earplugs or a cotton plug when bathing or swimming.