S’pore Doctor Reveals What Happens When You Dig Your Ears

Constantly digging your ears, whether it’s at home, in the toilet or in a business meeting with your OCD-filled boss?

Boss:

Well, here’s some bad news:

You gotta stop doing it.

And it’s not just because it’s rather unhygienic too. It’s because it might actually impact you negatively in the long term.

Which is hardly something you’ll want, do you?

S’pore Doctor Reveals What Happens When You Dig Your Ears

According to a video posted on CNA Lifestyle, a local doctor has revealed what truly happens when you dig your ears.

According to him, the ear canal has a natural curvature, which normally curves backwards before curving forward. The normal diameter of the ear canal is around 0.7cm, and the ear canal is about 2.5cm long. The outer third is the hair-bearing area and the inner third is the non-hair bearing area.

Apparently, human ears are self-cleaning. As you chew or talk, the jaw movements involved will cause the earwax near the entrance to fall out.

Sounds gross, but yeah. Every time you’re talking to your crush, earwax is falling all over your shoulders. 

Theirs too, if you need any consolation.

But I’m digressing; there are more reasons why you don’t need to clean your ears too. For one, the skin in the outer third of your ear canal’s reportedly as tough as your hand, but the inner part’s a lot thinner.

Your ear canal’s not very wide and deep too, so you don’t actually have to go very deep to scratch it, or you might risk bleeding.

And here’s the thing; if you blame an excessive loss of blood on your chubby finger or whatever stick you have jammed up there, and lament how you would have been better off with the magical weapon of the century:

Well, that’s not quite the case.

Apparently, cotton buds aren’t that much safer, because they might actually push wax deeper into the ear canal, causing it to be impacted and form a hardened lump.

And the consequences of it all?

Potential hearing loss…

Inflammation or even fungal spores.

And to exemplify the case, Dr Lim spoke of a patient who once turned up because of hearing loss and extreme itch in his ear. And the thing here? The poor fella has been regularly cleaning his ears with a cotton bud.

And so Dr Lim did what any professional doctor would, and proceeded to extract a cotton bud tip from the dude’s ear. What seemed to be a single source, however, morphed into multiple forms as Dr Lim extracted not two, not three, but seven cotton bud tips.

Seven times’s the charm, huh?

 

So… there’s no way to clean the ears?

According to CNA Lifestyle, the best way to clean those ears would be to dry the outer portion with a towel.

And if you absolutely die-die also have to use a cotton bud, make sure to go no deeper than the tip of your finger.

Unless you want to store some additional cotton bud tips for future perusal, of course.

You can check out the video here.

Fun fact: People used to apply earwax as lip balm or even material for manuscripts.

And the moral of the story here?

Don’t dig your ears, no matter the urge or circumstances. Instead, just go to sleep.

It’ll fall all over your pillow, nice and slow. 🙂