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What your earwax can reveal about your health

It's orange, it's sticky, and it's probably the last thing you want to talk about in polite conversation. Yet earwax is increasingly attracting the attention of scientists, who want to use it to learn more about diseases and conditions like cancer, heart disease, and metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes. The proper name for the gloopy stuff is cerumen, and it's a mix of secretions from two types of glands that line the outer ear canal; the ceruminous and sebaceous glands. The resulting goo is mixed with hair, dead skin flakes, and other bodily debris until it reaches the waxy consistency we all know and try our best not to think about.

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Articles of Interest

Doctors admonish us to leave earwax alone. Why won’t anyone listen?

Earwax is useful stuff. Some ancient physicians smeared it onto wounds as a soothing salve. Others thought its taste should be used as a diagnostic tool: a hint of sweetness, one doctor wrote, was a sign of impending death. Even today, doctors say it’s the most natural of soaps, carrying dead skin cells and debris out of hearing’s way.

Health Check: what you need to know about ear wax

The ear canal is essentially a cul de sac of skin that, unlike skin everywhere else, doesn’t get to remove dead cells through physical erosion. Ear wax is the creative solution to this problem.

Nature’s Ear Plugs

The yellow stuff in the outer part of the ear canal, scientifically named cerumen, is only partly a waxy substance, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. The rest of the so-called wax is an accretion of some dust and lots of dead skin cells, which normally collect in the passage as they are shed.

The Whole Ball of Wax: A Longer Than Normal Post About Your Cerumen

So what do you do with your ears? The first question is why do you think you have to do anything? If it’s just wax, it’s supposed to be in there.

Resources

NIH

Ear wax only becomes a problem if it causes a hearing impairment or other ear-related symptoms. The accumulation of wax occurs for many different reasons, including the over- or under-production of its constituent components, a failure to self-clear because of slow skin migration, or mechanical issues such as the use of cotton buds or hearing aids.