The convection of the procedure can remove some wax from your ear, if the wax is dry, but most of the satisfying debris that remains at the end of a Hopi candle burn is from the candle itself – that is made of wax! But they do, because of the evidence of wax fragments that emerge from the process. It is amazing, all the more so in this world of health and safety awareness, that anyone would willingly set fire to an object sticking out of the side of their head. Give ear candles a miss tooįinally, let's talk about Hopi candles. They might be good for adjusting eye make-up, but cotton buds should never, ever go in your ears – not unless you want to push whatever is in there further in. Then we prod it around for a while, until we touch wax, when we have no choice – because in the narrow channel of our ear canal, there is simply nowhere else to go – but to push on further, squashing the wax down against our ear drum.Īnd sadly, whatever benefit we get from the wax that comes out stuck to the cotton bud end is unlikely to make up for the compacting effect on the wax still stuck (and pushed deeper) in our ear. How could something so gentle-looking be harmful?Īs the soft cotton brushes the opening to our ear canal, feelings of warmth, comfort and safety pass through us, some kind of flashback to childhood. Anti-ear buds would be more accurate!Īs the wax loosens in our ear canal, and we try to make sense of its new found mobility – blocking and unblocking our hearing from one minute to the next, we become curious, and reach for the little blue stick with the fluffy ends. So misinformed in fact that we actually call them ear buds. Put down the cotton bud!Īnd this brings me on to the second problem of a misinformed popular culture: cotton buds. Those few weeks (unfortunately this is the reality in today's overstretched NHS) of waiting for the appointment can be among the most uncomfortable and sound-deprived we have ever experienced. In the meantime, however, the wax, loosened by the daily application of the oil, has spread out to fill more of the narrow confines of your ear canal, suffocating the ear and drowning out the sound. So why do so many of us try it? Olive oil is most prominent in the modern consciousness because GPs have been telling us for years to put it in our ears for a few weeks as a prelude to receiving an ear syringing if we have a hearing problem due to excessive wax.Ī few messy pillows, cushions, sofas and pyjamas later, we go along to the GP to receive a high pressure water treatment that literally blasts the loosened wax free. Here's why: olive oil softens ear wax, of that there is no doubt, but the wax sludge that results still does not go anywhere in the average sized ear canal. It's a remedy as old as time, but using olive oil for resolving hearing problems is not a good idea.
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