maybe with kids who dislike ear cleaning, clean your own ears first with them watching.
the hand bulb syringes are not noisy or uncomfortable like a waterpick or a plunger syringe.
Every 10 years or so I get a buildup that impacts my hearing, where I feel like I’m going deaf (everything is muffled, sometimes goes in and out, eventually I can barely hear anything). Then I have to visit an ENT doc and he scrapes out an amazing amount of wax. Extremely unpleasant; think dental cleaning, only in your ears. The last time I went, a couple of years ago, my hearing improved immensely afterward, to the point where I noticed how LOUD everything is, where the world was very quiet, almost serene beforehand. Very strange experience.
I use something called Cerumol, an OTC wax softener. It is quite mild and I put it in and the next day clean it out in the shower the next day with a rubber bulb. Once I had been swimming in the ocean for a half hour, elementary backstroke with ears under water and when I came out, brown gunk came dripping out of my ears and my hearing got clearer.
When I was a kid the doctor was always digging lumps of wax out of my ears the size of puppies. My mom used hydrogen peroxide (3%) with an eyedropper to loosen and remove the gunk. It seemed to get better with adulthood, although a few times after swimming I’ve had lumps spontaneously eject from my ear canal.
No, it doesn’t seem to affect my hearing at all.
Either ask the doctor how to keep the wax down to reasonable levels, or use one of the OTC kits available these days everywhere.
I was having trouble hearing out of one ear a couple of years ago, and went to the ear doctor. She did clean a wax block out of my ear, but strangely enough, it was the OTHER one that was feeling deaf. The cleaning did straighten everything out. The human body is a strange thing.
Here was my contribution to Doper Ear Lore. With pictures!
That water-pik thing is painful, I can attest to that. When I was about six years old, my sibs and I were fascinated with a little bit of doggerel that goes, in part:
Teddy Bear has beans in his ears
beans in his ears
beans in his ears
(and no, I will not try to find a youtube clip. Knock yourself out, anyone who wants to)
All well and good, until the day I was chanting that in the far back seat of the station wagon, and I happened to find an unpopped kernel of popcorn from our last visit to the drive-in movies. Naturally, I put it in my ear (since I didn’t have a bean).
To his credit, the doctor tried his best to extract the thing without the use of hydraulics.
There’s a gene that determines the type of earwax a person has. Some people have the hard/dry wax gene, and some people have the soft/wet type. The people with the hard/dry gene get most of the buildup problems.
I’m glad I’m a soft/wet type!
I had no idea at all that human ear wax was anything but yellow. I’ve never seen or heard of black ear wax coming out of people before. I always associated dark wax with dogs and cats.
I use a q-tip after showering, even though they say not to. It’s like scratching an itch, though, and my ears feel weirdly wet until I swab them out. I’m just careful and don’t put them in very far.
Learn something new every day…
You sound like a fellow soft/wet type. Let’s point and laugh at all these hard/dry types! 
<Nelson laugh>
as it compacts and maybe oxidizes it gets darker brown, it may get shiny if really compressed.
This has been a life long problem for me. After going to the doc for the flush-outs and the pick-outs more times than I can remember, the doc finally told me I could use a drop of peroxide every so often to help control it. Not sure, though, at your daughter’s age she will tolerate the bubbling sensation, though it isn’t painful, just uncomfortable, but not as traumatic as the flush-outs and pick-outs. It never really effects my hearing, but I can tell when they need to be treated when I start feeling a kinda plugged up sensation.
Actually, her wax is soft and yellow. I am guessing some of it runs outwards and some of it runs inwards. The wax that runs towards her eardrum builds up and gets darker (oxidation?), but it is originally as yellow and soft as the one running outside, it is just that she produces so much that it builds up fast.
I believe that dry wax is whitish.
Ooh, maybe if people save up the chunks, they can be polished like amber and worn as jewelry! :eek:
Talk about family heirlooms. Hey, DNA!
In my search to see if ear wax contains DNA, I found this article from the NYT on genetics of wet vs. dry ear wax.
Whoa. Little body odor in East Asia? I need to move.
This happened to me about 10 years ago. My hearing was getting more and more muffled. Being a young man in my early/mid 20s, I had no desire to waste time going to the doctor, so I went to the drug store and took care of the problem myself (after about six months of progressively worse hearing).
After all the wax had been “gotten,” and my ears finally popped, it was like sound was turned on for the first time. I was in my bathroom and kept hearing this rustling noise. “What the hell is that?” It was my pants rubbing together as I moved. It seemed so loud to me that it sounded like someone was crinkling cellophane right over my ears.
My dad had a horrible problem with ear wax. I was never sure if it was due to his having perforated ear drums or not, but I can remember him coming home frome the ear doctor once a week for a couple of months while being fitted for hearing aids and to get prepped for surgery to put in “new” ear drums, and his ears would be pristine. Not quite a week later they’d be full of black and dark yellow nastyness. He’d spend an hour just digging them out and…wee.
The last time I had to have mine cleaned out I could have grown potatoes in the stuff they got out!
Just imagine all those farts you thought you sneaked! :o
And those secrets you thought you wispered :eek:
My wax be whacks, yo. Usually I poke at it with an allen wrench a couple times a week, when it starts to itch and get overwhelming, and go in for an earrigation(I made up that word) every couple years. I’m overdue for one at the moment.
I can’t use peroxide. It causes me inner ear infections and swelling that displace my jaw and make eating impossible.
I’m a huge overproducer of wax, and my ear canal is occluded or something (whatever the technical term is for “too twisty to self-clean properly”). I had my ears flushed by a poorly-experienced nurse once, which made it worse because she used an enormous syringe with very low water pressure. Then I had a doctor do it right, who used a small highly-pressurized rubber tipped syringe, and it worked immediately. You wouldn’t believe how much wax came out, it was so fascinatingly disgusting (globs and globs, I don’t even know how it was possible). And everything sounded way too loud afterward, until I got used to it. Like, everyday sounds gave me headaches for a week. Be on the lookout for that with your kid.