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Why Shouldn’t You Stick Q-tips in Your Ears?
You shouldn’t! But so many people do it anyway.
OCT 15, 202310:00 AM
This is Explainer, a column that answers questions we all have (or should have).
As someone who regularly “cleans” my ear canals with cotton swabs, a question hangs over me basically every day: How bad is it…really?
I know I am not supposed to stick cotton swabs in my ears. We all know this. It says so right there on the Q-tip packaging: “Do not insert swab into ear canal.”
The American Academy of Otolaryngology is similarly unambiguous on the issue, noting that sticking Q-tips or other objects in your ear “may cause a cut in your ear canal, poke a hole in your ear drum, or hurt the hearing bones, leading to hearing loss, dizziness, ringing, and other symptoms of ear injury.”
And yet, many people do stick Q-tips in their ears. The Washington Post once called the swabs “the most bizarre thing people buy,” given that they are often used for something you are expressly not supposed to use them for. Surveys done at doctor’s offices report that over half of patients stick Q-tips in their ears. And yet … we’re not all walking around with “hearing loss, dizziness, ringing, and other symptoms of ear injury.” (Are we?) Could digging around in our ears with Q-tips really be so bad?
According to one ear, nose, and throat doctor I found: No, it’s actually not. “I don’t agree that swabbing your ears regularly is dangerous and should be avoided,” said William Portnoy, who also specializes in plastic surgery and is based in Miami, noting that he cleans his ears with cotton swabs and has his whole life. “I’m, like, the pariah of the otolaryngology community,” he added.
Portnoy made his case in a 2016 review paper in the International Journal of Head and Neck Surgery titled “To Swab or Not to Swab.” The use of cotton-tipped swabs to clean ears is “ubiquitous,” he wrote. Out of 100 patients that he surveyed at his office, 77 percent used cotton swabs, and nearly half did so on a daily basis. Just four reported “complications” from ear cleaning: in three cases, impacted wax; and in one, an “unspecified injury.” While “most otolaryngologists have seen injuries caused by ear canal swabs,” he wrote, there’s no clear data on just how often such injuries—which really do sound harrowing!—occur. Perhaps what’s needed is education on how to safely use Q-tips, given that they are used so widely anyway.
One thing that Portnoy does see as a problem: people sticking Q-tips in their ears after wax has built up. “You don’t want to start swabbing if your ear is impacted with wax to begin with,” Portnoy said. That just pushes the wax farther down. Another is, obviously, the fact that you should not push the Q-tip so far that it touches the eardrum.
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