For decades, the Q-tip has been a bathroom staple for ear cleaning, almost instinctively used to remove earwax. Yet, health ...

In other words, earwax makes your ears naturally self-cleaning. In most cases, you don't need to dig into your ear canals or do anything to clean them out -- they'll do the job on their own.

Worse still, if you push a Q-tip too hard or too far into your ear canal, you may actually puncture your ear drum. The ear canal is only about an inch (2.5 centimeters) deep, so there's not a lot ...

Your ears. As ear wax accumulates, it may be tempting to stick a cotton swab in your canal to clear it out. But the medical experts I spoke to said that it can be dangerous and damage your ear canal.

The use of cotton-tipped swabs to clean ears is “ubiquitous,” he wrote. Out of 100 patients that he surveyed at his office, 77 percent used cotton swabs, and nearly half did so on a daily basis.

Cotton swabs “really weren’t made to clean your ears — all they do is just push the wax deeper down into your ear canal and this causes an impaction,” Dr. Tonia L. Farmer advised.… ...