DOCTORS warn us against and we all know we shouldn’t do it and yet many people still clean their ears with cotton buds.
It’s easy to dismiss advice against using cotton swabs in your ears if you’ve already done it hundreds of times before and lived to tell the tale.
Believe it or not though, that habit can make ears blockages worse and even give you a hearing problem.
When we put cotton buds in our ears, it pushes the wax down the ear canal towards the eardrum and impacts it.
If this build-up of earwax pushes up against the eardrum, it won’t vibrate as well and therefore can reduce your hearing.
Besides, there should be no need to clean our ears at all as they are “self-cleaning”, according to Oxford University Hospitals.
A patient guide reads: "The skin in your ears acts like a conveyor belt. It travels along your ear canal from your ear drum bringing any debris with it.
"If you use cotton buds or anything else to clean your ears, you can disrupt the ears' natural cleaning system.
"Often the only thing this achieves is to push wax further down the ear canal, making you feel deaf temporarily and causing damage to your ear canal or your ear drum."
If you do experience an abnormal build-up of earwax, the best thing to do is have your ears cleaned out by your GP.
