We have all heard at least one horrifying or at the least alarming story about why we should not use a cotton swab. There are countless horror stories that will make the hair on your neck stand up. Despite all the stories about cotton swabs, none of these accounts regarding the misuse of our faithful and reliable wax removers have stopped us from using them.
Serious Damage Caused By Cotton Swabs
There has been a recent account of an Australian woman known as Jasmine. In the Australian reality magazine, That’s Life; Jasmine explains how her obsessive ear cleaning with cotton swabs rewarded her with a life-threatening infection that eroded her skull and left her with serious hearing loss.
Jasmine claims that she consistently cleaned her ears with cotton swabs every night. One night she noticed some blood on the tip of the bud. The result of her overeager ear swabbing caused an infection deep in her ear canal. Jasmine tells how doctors diagnosed her condition. They told her that the skull bone behind her ear was so thin that she is at risk of permanent hearing loss.
Good News About Cotton Swabs
They have documented similar cases in the past. The good news is that you are very unlikely to get such a life-threatening problem from gently cleaning your ears once or twice a month. Overdoing it by stuffing cotton swabs down your ear canal will cause damage in the long run.
A 2017 case report discovered 263,300 children in the United States landed in the emergency ward between 1990 and 2010. That is 36 kids a day injured by cotton swabs.
There is a general misconception that we have to clean our ear canal ourselves at home. Pediatric ear, nose and throat surgeon Dr. Kris Jatana from Nationwide Hospital in Ohio told Reuters in 2017:
“While cotton-tipped applicators may seem harmless, there are a lot of potential risks to using them to clean the ears.”
Besides physical trauma, cotton swabs can introduce external pathogens into the ear. Inner and middle ear infections are especially worrying, as these are near our brain and vestibular system.
You Don’t Need To Use Cotton Swabs
Our ears are, in fact, self-cleaning entities. The fluid properties of the wax itself naturally take care of the ear-cleaning process. So there is actually no need for the use of cotton swabs to clean inside our ears. A buildup of wax may sometimes give us the desire to clean our ears ourselves at home with a swab, but it is actually a harmless condition curable with no need for cotton swabs.
The bottom line is that the use of cotton swabs offers very little to no medical benefits. Manufacturing cotton swabs mostly involves the use of plastic. They are not biodegradable, and if flushed down the toilet, they make their way into our water systems and contribute to ocean plastic pollution.
