Good for you/Bad for you

By Megan Hirt

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Cotton swabs are perfect for doing your makeup and dusting your keyboard, but these tiny tools should lose their rep as safe scrubbers for your ears. “If people go too far in, they can actually puncture the eardrum, and you risk hearing loss as well as infection,” says Stephen Segebrecht, ear, nose and throat specialist with Lawrence Otolaryngology Associates. Wax only forms on the outer part of the ear, so using a cotton swab is actually what pushes wax back to cause build-up deep in the ear. “When people have wax all the way down by their eardrum, you almost always see a concavity there that corresponds to a Q-tip hit,” says Barry Castaneda, Topeka ear, nose and throat specialist. Cleaning just the outer crevices is all that’s needed to keep ears wax free, and, if you do use a cotton swab, Castaneda recommends holding it at the cotton tip to keep from going too far in. To clear a waterlogged ear sans cotton swab, Segebrecht says to put in several drops of rubbing alcohol, lean over, shake your ear and then listen as the water disappears, no swabbage required.

Verdict­—bad for you.

 

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