Stop Cleaning Inside Your Ears: It’s Bad for You
Everyone always says you should wash behind your ears. But what about inside your ears? You should pretty much never clean those, and trying sends more people to the hospital every year with cotton swab–induced injuries than show up with wounds from razor blades, according to Real Clear Science. Here’s the basic problem:
For the most part, swabs merely condense and impact the earwax further into the ear canal, where it can cause pain, pressure, and temporarily poor hearing.
“There’s no need to clean your ears with a cotton bud,” writes Dr. Rob Hicks. “The ear has its own internal cleaning mechanism. Fats and oils in the ear canal trap any particles and transport them out of the ear as wax. This falls out of the ear without us noticing.”