When I was about 12, my health teacher told our class that roaches sometimes crawl into sleeping people’s ear canals and get stuck. This causes pain and hearing problems. Within a week of being told this, I suffered pain and hearing problems in one ear. I freaked out, went to the doctor, and fully expected him to pull a roach out of my ear. Instead, he took out a lot of earwax. This marked the beginning of my ongoing battle against earwax. I’ve been wondering ever since: What is earwax for? Why do I produce way too much of it? And was my health teacher right about roaches? –Bob Vesterman, via the Internet
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The roach part is where the juicy stuff comes in, but first the following sober discourse. Earwax–called cerumen by doctors because they don’t want people to realize they’re talking about earwax–is a normal secretion of special glands in the outer ear. The wax coats the outer part of the ear canal, trapping germs and debris and preventing them from reaching the eardrum. If you didn’t have any your ears would, at a minimum, itch like hell. In other words, earwax is good! You should be organizing Earwax Appreciation Week!
Now the roaches. You’re thinking this is some kind of deranged myth. Uh-uh. Happens all the time. A controversy has raged since 1980 over the best way to get the little bastards out. The conventional remedy: drown the critter with mineral oil. “One cannot use the commercially available roach sprays,” one MD sagely notes, “because of technical difficulty and for possible medicolegal reasons”; i.e., the patient might sue. But mineral oil isn’t so great either, because the insect takes a while to go through its death throes in the patient’s ear.
