Some sound advice when it comes to ear wax
“Oh, my goodness, you could grow potatoes in those ears — wash them again!” It’s an old saying, but one some parents are sure to admonish their children with at bath time, repeating what they heard as kids from their own parents. But doctors say wax has nothing to do with poor hygiene and is merely the body’s way of shielding the delicate inner workings of the ear and protecting precious hearing. “The first thing that everybody should recognize is, it’s not dirt, it’s not something that has to be removed,” says Dr. Ronald Fenton, an otolaryngologist (ear, nose and throat specialist) at St. Michael’s Hospital. “A lot of people think that their personal hygiene is less than perfect if they don’t remove their wax,” he says. “That’s the first thing they’ve got to be disabused of.” Ear wax, known medically as cerumen, is made up of sloughed-off dead skin and a sticky substance secreted from glands in the outer third of the ear canal.
“Basically, it is a protective barrier,” says Fenton, stopping dirt, microbes, insects and water from getting into the middle or inner chambers of the ear. The type of ear wax a person has — wet or dry — seems to be determined by genetics: Caucasians and Africans typically have wet wax, which can range in colour from golden brown to dark brown, while Asians and aboriginals are more likely to have dry wax, which is greyish in colour and tends to be flakier.
No matter which kind a person has, it serves some important functions, explains Dr. Charles Beatty, an otolaryngologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
“It can be a bit of a lubricant for the skin — it keeps (the ears) from getting too dry and the skin from getting scaly and itchy — and can protect against fungus and bacterial infections,” he says.
Still, most people seem determined to root out wax from their ears — using a variety of implements, from cotton swabs to gadgets better left to their intended purposes, the doctors say.
“There’s sort of the adage: Don’t put anything bigger or smaller than your elbow in your ear,” says Beatty, who lists hairpins and car keys among the devices some people employ.
Even a cotton swab will often end up “just pushing a fair amount of the wax deeper and deeper into the ear canal,” he says. “We see far more problems from overaggressive or overzealous attempts to clean wax by individuals or even occasionally by health-care providers than we see from having an accumulation of wax.”
Fenton, the Toronto doctor, gets about two or three cases referred to him each year in which the patient has inadvertently punctured an ear drum or pushed the three tiny vibrating bones of hearing, called ossicles, out of position.
These injuries cannot always be resolved, even with surgery, and can lead to permanent hearing loss.
While people are generally encouraged to do no more than clean their outer ears with a warm, damp face cloth, there are cases when excessive wax will form a plug in the ear canal, potentially causing ear ache, a feeling of fullness, ear noise called tinnitus, and diminished hearing.
“Sometimes, when it’s really dried and hard, it’s almost like a little pebble in the ear,” says Beatty. “It can be uncomfortable or painful. So that’s when (doctors) have to remove the wax.”