Medical expert gives warning to anyone who cleans their ears with cotton swabs

Most of us have been using cotton swabs to clean our ears since babyhood, but apparently, it’s really not a good idea.

The swabs, aka Q-Tips, have been around for decades, first being made in the 1920s, and they’ve been the easiest choice to clean out earwax ever since.

But is it good for you? Apparently not.

According to a neurotologist, while we use a lot of tools to clean our ears, they’re not the ‘safest’ options.

"While all of those technologies are nifty and cool to see, they’re not the safest," said Ana H. Kim, a professor of otolaryngology at Columbia University who spoke to the Washington Post.

Earwax is produced by glands in the ear canal, and even though it’s annoying and unsightly, it’s actually important for our ear health.

This is because it is used to moisturise the skin inside the ear canal, it also traps debris from entering too far to block or damage our eardrums, among other things.

Cotton swabs have been around for a century (Getty Stock Images)

A bit like how our bodily hair acts to do the same thing.

As earwax is only produced in the last third of the ear canal, the upper portion should be free of any substance. Anyway, apparently the ear self-cleans, as per Kim, who said when you chew food or talk, your jaw pushes the earwax further out so that it falls out or you can gently coax it out.

But what you shouldn’t do is jab anything in there.

“After showering, when everything is moist, you can use a towel or a Q-tip, and you can swab around the entry point, not going deeper into the ear canal,” she said.

If you put a cotton swab inside, you could be disrupting the natural cleaning process and pushing the wax deeper into the canal, where it can muffle your hearing.

That’s bad news for anyone, who like me, enjoys jamming it in there until you can practically feel it scratching your eardrum.

This action could actually scratch your ear canal, leading to bacterial and fungal intrusion. You could even injure yourself.

You can damage your ear by jamming Q-tips in too far (Nes / Getty)

Kim admitted to seeing cotton swab heads stuck in the ear canal when someone has accidentally knocked into their arm, leading to them shoving it in too far.

At this point, it could puncture the eardrum or even move the ossicles (hearing bones), causing hearing loss.

Even though cotton swabs can be bad, that doesn’t mean the other tools get off with a free pass. This is because even tools that have little spoons on the end to scrape out wax can have similar issues.

Ear candles aren’t great either, as they can burn your skin.

Instead, you should try removing the wax after showering so that the earwax has softened due to the heat, and then dampening a cotton swab with mineral oil or baby oil before using it lightly around the opening of your ear.

“But never go inside,” Kim said.

To know you’re in the right place, she said go to a mirror, and ‘if you can’t see the tip of your Q-tip head, that means you’ve gone in too far’. Or alternatively, you can purchase some over-the-counter earwax removal drops.