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Unpopular opinion: you can absolutely use Q tips if your ear canals are wider and you don't just jam it in.
What I do is start at the entrance and twist as I go in and again as it's coming out. My primary care has never found anything wrong with my ears.
A few years back I bought one of these on a whim and I've found it to be an excellent ear wax removal tool. Just take care when inserting - that's the motion that can shove wax deeper or impact your ear drum.
A quick Googling shows that there are a ton of other tools with a wide variety of shapes and materials, but this is the one that I can personally vouch for. Cleaning the wax off of the finned end after use requires a strong jet of water, that's the only downside I can think of.
Finally! A solution the problem that qtips are so inexpensive!
I saw a box of these on Amazon for $6. You're really going to quibble over a few bucks?
Besides, these do a better job than wads of cotton on sticks. So it's worth a few bucks.
Well I use like two qtips after every shower.
These are reusable. Those ones I bought a few years back are still in use.
That changes the equation enormously. I read their text, and they do say they should be discarded after a use. That could be CYA, though. Do you just wash them with soap and water, or wipe them with alcohol or something?
Oh, they say that? Weird, I distinctly recall the box saying "reusable" when I bought them years ago. I guess it's like the thing where Q-tips are labelled as "not to be crammed into your ear-holes", to bring it full circle.
I clean them using a hand bidet, the high-pressure stream of water from it blasts all the wax out from between the vanes. Soaking them in some kind of soapy water or solvent sounds like it'd work well too, if you don't have a high pressure water stream readily available.
Yup. My ear canals are much wider than the average q tip, so I don't really use them as plungers, they're more for scraping the sides.
I am terrified of losing my hearing or otherwise damaging my ears (long story, not that interesting), so I simply refuse to use them as far in as I safely could.
I used to do that, but I’m wondering if that was part of me developing my current condition.
I've read that removing earwax constantly can actually cause more earwax production.
Personally I do use qtips after every shower. Most of the time I don't get anything, and all I'm accomplishing is mopping up moisture. Once in a while I get a smear of orange wax and go in for a repeat. I think it varies wildly though; there is a big distinction between people with dry earwax vs wet, but I think there is also variation within those categories.
Yeah if you don't have issues caused by earwax or wear hearing aids or regularly wear ear plugs for long periods of time you're better off leaving it in. It's there to protect your ears.
Too much earwax can clog the ear and cause hearing loss until its removed. Some people like some of my family overproduce to that point. Additionally normally it falls out of your ears at a regular pace, ear plugs can cause it to clog up. If you wear hearing aids with domes in my experience it's not nearly as much of an issue, but I did get regular clogging back in the days that hearing aids used molds and had to have them cleaned out every year or so.