The Atlantic

You Can See Inside Your Ear. That Doesn’t Mean You Should.

TikTok loves high-tech gadgets for scraping out ear wax. Doctors? Not so much.
Source: Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.

The ear is a marvelous, humble organ. It powers our hearing and also our balance, keeping us upright and connected to the world around us. In return, ear doctors tend to ask that we follow one very simple rule: Don’t put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear. Of course, you can’t actually fit your elbow inside your ear. But you can fit a Q-tip, which comes with this warning: “Do not insert swab into ear canal. Entering the ear canal could cause injury.”

None of this has stopped people from jabbing things into their ears. Humans have a long history

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