It’s important to take care of your ears, but many people don’t think about ear health until they have to. Hear from Bailey Borowicz, PA-C, a physician assistant who specializes in the ear, nose and throat (ENT), about the importance of ear health, common misconceptions about ear cleaning, and when it might be time to get your ears checked out.
General Ear Health
According to Bailey, there are two things to consider when talking about ear health: physical ear health and hearing health.
Physical ear health includes protecting the integrity of the ear canal and maintaining clean ears. She recommends staying away from Q-tips and notes that most over the counter products are not effective.
“Q-tips are a classic example. We see plenty of people with blood in their ear canals and they don't know why. It’s because they scrape their ear canal with a Q-tip,” Bailey says. “You can also poke your eardrum causing a hole, which can then affect your hearing.”
Hearing health tends to revolve around wearing earplugs and protecting your ears from loud noises as best you can. “We're big proponents of hearing aids and preventing any hearing loss that can be prevented. Obviously there is age related hearing loss, but you should wear ear plugs when going to concerts or sporting events,” she explains.
Ear Cleaning
When talking about ear cleaning, the most important thing to know is that in most cases, your ear canals naturally clean themselves.
“You don’t need to clean your ears. Your earwax is natural,” Bailey says. Having some ear wax in your ears can actually help protect them from infections, dust particles or bugs.
“Wax is really just sloughing skin. It's meant to be there. The only reason why we ever clean it out is if it's causing symptoms,” she explains. ”If you're not having any symptoms, you don't need to go in there digging.”
Common symptoms that might indicate a need for ear cleaning include:
- Changes in hearing
- Ear pain
- Ear infections
- Tinnitus or ringing in the ears
- Ears feeling plugged
For people who want to clean their own ears, Bailey talks about at-home methods that can help your ears clean themselves. “The best thing to do is just to help the wax come out on its own by softening it. Generally before a shower with more of a natural product like olive oil, mineral oil or peroxide,” she says. “The steam and water from the shower will help move all of that wax out.”
When patients come in to get their ears professionally cleaned, those appointments can include removing a buildup of earwax, foreign bodies like bugs or small objects or pus and debris from ear infections.
“It's not just ear wax cleanings. There's a lot of reasons why we clean ears,” Bailey explains.
Getting your ears checked out
If you’re experiencing hearing changes, pain in your ears or another symptom and think you might need your ears to be professionally cleaned, Bailey recommends first setting up an appointment with your primary care provider to make sure an ear cleaning is right for you.
People that are coming in because of an ear infection may not need to get their ears cleaned again, but people that are getting ear cleanings to remove wax buildup or treat other ear symptoms may come back on a three month, six month or yearly basis.
If you experience sudden hearing loss, Bailey says to make an appointment with your primary care provider or go into an ENT clinic as soon as possible. “Some people might give it a couple of days before they are worried about it,” she says. “We would much rather you come in on a false alarm than wait too long and then have permanent hearing loss.”
Take the first step toward better ear health. Call 612-626-5900 to schedule an appointment with Bailey or contact your primary care provider to set up a visit today.