A lot of people seem to derive great pleasure from using a Q-Tip to clean out the wax from their ear. But according to many experts, you could potentially be doing damage to your ear, serious damage in some cases, and it’s not what you might think.
First of all, let’s deal with the wax inside your ears, which is what most people like to clean out. You body has a natural inbuilt cleaning system, which will sort out any serious wax blockage should one occur. But by cleaning out the wax ourselves we are actually removing one of our bodies defences against invaders. Think of the wax in a similar way to a Spiders web. The purpose of the web is to trap its prey so that it can eat. Now obviously that is not what our ear wax does for our bodies, but what it does do is to trap invaders that might fall into your ear. Due to the stickiness of the wax, it grabs hold and prevents entry into our bodies. By removing that wax with a Q-tip you actually can encourage foreign bodies to enter your own.
The one big thing people are worried about when using a Q-tip is the wool falling off and going down their ear, but the bigger risk by far is that you actually push the wax further down into your ear potentially causing problems with your ear drum. So as you can see using a Q-tip in your ear is not a good idea under any circumstances, regardless of how good it feels.