The truth about cleaning your ears with cotton swabs

We all know that you’re not supposed to clean your ears with a Q-tip. And yet, people still do it all the time. Surely you’ve heard the horror stories about a friend of a friend of a friend piercing their eardrum (or maybe you watch Girls and have yet to scrub the memory of Hannah’s Q-tip scene out of your head). But do you really know what’s at stake? And how bad is it that no matter how many times you’re told to stop you know that you’re never going to drop the habit?

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Here are the ear-cleaning do’s, don’ts, and please-don’t-but-if-you-do’s you need to know.

The most basic issue is that using a Q-tip is probably doing the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. Your intention is to get earwax out, but you’re probably just packing it deeper in there, which can plug up your ear canal and make you feel stuffy or itchy, or can interfere with your hearing. If the ear canal is totally blocked with wax you can get tinnitus, a ringing or buzzing in the ear.

And don’t think your doctor isn’t going to notice, either. “You can actually see the impression of the Q-tip on the earwax,” when you look at it with a scope, Chang said. Busted.

The skin inside your ear canal is also really, really sensitive, so scraping around in there with a stick wrapped in cotton can scratch it, which leaves you open to ear infections. If an infection gets really bad you can get swimmer’s ear, which is when the skin swells up so much that it completely closes the ear canal. It’s also really painful.

If you go too far down the ear canal with the swab, you can literally put a Q-tip-sized hole in your eardrum. Chang said that usually when he sees this it’s because the patient was cleaning her ear, and her boyfriend came into the bathroom, startling her and causing her to jerk her arm. Or she was multitasking and accidentally bumped her elbow into the wall.

The result: very sharp pain and bleeding. Hearing loss is not uncommon. “The good news,” according to Chang, “is that the vast majority of the time the body will heal the hole closed on its own. Depending on how big the hole is, it may close up completely in a week.” More severe cases can take a couple months to heal, and in the worst-case scenario, surgery is required. If it happens to you, call a doctor right away and definitely don’t put any water in your ear because it could trigger an infection.