This section reveals some of the common and intriguing myths in the world of medicine and discusses some of the exciting recent medical discoveries and how they affect your world.


6. "EARWAX IS BAD AND SHOULD BE REMOVED"

"Whaaaad he say Mildred??"
"HE SAID YOU'RE DEAF, YOU OLD FOOL ".
"I'm dead???"
"NO BERT... NOT YET."
I finally interrupt this romantic interlude, "Mrs. Bloggins ,your husband's ears are jammed with wax."
"I got jam on my slacks???" yells Bert.

Warning: If reading about bodily fluids makes you at all queasy or if the phrase" bodily fluids" itself induces violent waves of nausea, perhaps this column is best not read at the dinner table. In fact, it is foolish to ever read medical columns in the vicinity of tomato soup, cauliflower, refried beans or sushi. Today, EAR WAX.... (retch). Ear wax, medically referred to as cerumen, has been tenderly cultured in your ear canal by mother nature for a reason... so leave it alone! (For those of you hard of hearing...SO LEAVE IT ALONE!!) It is not bad stuff. It is good stuff. Cerumen is made by special glands called "plugger-uppers" that live on the outer third of your ear canal. It has three purposes to it's sluggish existence.
First; it protects the very sensitive skin of your ear canal from water and infections. Secondly; it protects your ear drum from dirt and grit by trapping it before it gets to the drum, and finally; cerumen gets great glee out of driving normally intelligent people to distraction as they attempt to rotorooter it out with everything ranging from Q tips to cue sticks.

If wax is so good for us, why do we try so hard to get it out? Perhaps it is a teleological thing that began when mother Eve wet the corner of her fig leaf with saliva and ram-rodded it down Cain's canal to get out the wax, put there no doubt by the serpent. Or perhaps, it is because we have this innate desire to scrape off anything that isn't nailed to our carcass.

Unfortunately, the practice of ramming bobby pins, fingernails or darning needles into our ears is highly detrimental. Not only does it denude the ear of the protective cerumen and introduce micro cracks into the skin of the canal itself (which in turn gets infected), but it also jams the wax up against a very flimsy drum. What follows is deafness, infection, swelling and pain in the canal that makes you rush down to the doctor with what is actually called "Q tip ear". NEVER STICK ANYTHING SMALLER THAN YOUR ELBOW IN YOUR EAR!!

Warning: It seems that wherever there is an orifice in the human body there are "practitioners" willing to cleanse or irrigate it. The ear canal, unfortunately, is not immune. Ear candling is one of those ancient Druid practices invented by Charla Tan whereby the victim actually has hollow wax candles stuck in each ear and then lit! The practitioner then dashes out of the room collapsing in spasms of laughter, sobered only by the fact that they have just made another $50. A vacuum is created wherein some ear wax along with significant amounts of cerebral grey matter are sucked into the hollow tube. While some folks generate a meagre amount of wax, others make enough to plug up the entire canal, in Panama. In some cases, the natural process of wax removal does not work well and the ear jams up. Avoid Q-tips. But before going to the doctor, please:
a. apply a few drops of olive or mineral oil to the ear canal for 3 days, or b. mix baking soda with a couple of ounces of water and dump that in there three times a day for a couple of days.
Then c. see the doctor who will (retch...gag) gently flush your ear. Using a 300,000psi power washer, the water is fired into your ear whereby it strikes your drum and returns with the hated wax, unless of course you happen to watch a lot of Jerry Springer in which case it comes flying out the other ear. And then there's ol' Bert who winks at me as he glances at Mildred and whispers "Doc,..... just leave it in there".