Home remedies · Everyday life & travel
No home remedy here replaces treatment, and none is talked down. What has done good for generations does good — even if no one ever measured it. Where something is well studied, it says so. Where it is only experience, it says that too.
Warm two or three drops of olive or almond oil to body temperature — in the hand, not on the stove. Lying on your side, put it into the ear, stay for five minutes, then put a cloth underneath and get up. Two or three times a day for three to five days. After that the plug usually works its own way out.
Earwax is made of sebum, shed horn cells and the secretion of the wax glands — mostly fat and keratin, hardly any water. That is exactly why water dissolves it badly and oil well: fat dissolves in fat. The oil works in between the flakes, softens the plug and makes it slippery, so that the ear canal’s self-cleaning can carry it outward. That self-cleaning runs anyway — the skin of the canal migrates slowly outward and takes everything with it.
Do not push anything into the ear canal. A cotton bud takes a little away at the front and pushes the rest deeper, where it wedges — the commonest cause of a plug is the attempt to remove it. Ear candles create no suction; what is found in them afterwards is wax from the candle. No oil with a hole in the eardrum, after ear surgery, or with grommets.
With pain, discharge, fever, sudden hearing loss, dizziness or a new noise in the ear. A plug that does not give way after a week of oil should be flushed out — that takes a few minutes in the practice and beats carrying on at it.
Have it assessed: heat with confusion, dry hot skin or clouded consciousness — that is more than exhaustion. A one-sided swollen leg after a long journey. And anything new that does not go away within a few days.