DEAR DOCTOR K: I’ve always used a cotton-tipped swab to clean earwax out of my ears. My husband says this is dangerous. I think it would be more harmful to leave the wax in my ears. Who’s right? DEAR ...

Don't stick anything smaller than your elbow in your ear. We've all heard the warning, yet many of us still reach for the cotton swab when we feel a little plugged up. So obviously, the message is not ...

Earwax is a fact of life. We’ve all got it, and sometimes it gets a little gross. That leads many people to feel the need to clean out their ear canals. Show of hands, how many of you reach for a ...

We all know that you’re not supposed to clean your ears with a Q-tip. And yet, people still do it all the time. Surely you’ve heard the horror stories about a friend of a friend of a friend piercing ...

Mom was right: Cotton swabs, paper clips, car keys and other cleaning hacks — hey, how about a toothpick! — are total no-no’s for dealing with ear boogers. So said the American Academy of ...

Feel the need to clean your child’s ears? Step away from that cotton swab. Despite years of warnings to avoid putting the product into the ear canal, more than 263,000 children in the U.S. had to be ...

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. Woman cleaning ear using cotton stick ...

It's a habit so ingrained it feels almost automatic: grabbing a cotton swab to clean out your ears after a shower. For many, the satisfaction of seeing earwax on the tip provides a deceptive sense of ...

The advice from doctors is clear: Don’t use cotton swabs to clean your ears. But people continue to use a soft-tipped plastic or paper stick to dig out the wax from their ear canals – and it’s a ...