ENT Doctors Debunk 11 Ear And Nose Myths

Let's clarify this point:To stop a nosebleed, pinch the bridge of your nose and tilt your head back.This is partially incorrect. Tilt your head slightly forward, not backward, to prevent blood from flowing down your throat. Pinch the soft part of your nose, the nostrils, just below the bridge. This helps apply pressure to the bleeding point and usually stops the bleeding within a few minutes. Tilting your head back can cause blood to flow down your throat, which can be swallowed and potentially cause choking or stomach upset.

I’m dr eric voigt i'm an otolaryngologist head and neck surgeon i'm an associate professor of otolaryngology at nyu langone health i've been in practice for over 20 years and i am dr jackie jones i'm an associate professor of otolaryngology at weill cornell medicine and i've been in practice for almost 31 years now we are specialists in ear nose and throat so our field actually the real title is oto rhino laryngology odo's ear rhino his nose larynx is laryngology so we sort of think of it as one continuous passage from your nose down into your lungs so everything is interconnected and today we will be debunking myths of the ear nose and throat it's okay to hold in your sneeze not a good idea i think a small sneeze can be held in but if you're generating one of those big sneezes you don't want to hold it in all of that pressure is going to back up into your ears into your throat into your lungs our nose is the filter of everything we're breathing in so you're breathing in pollen you're breathing in germs you're breathing in particles and dust that builds up in our mucus and then a sneeze is the reflex to get that material out but sneezing is overall a good thing because you are clearing out your nose but again cover up cover up it's okay to use q-tips to clean your ears oh boy oh boy so this is a box of cotton tip applicators and there is a warning on here but whoa eric i don't think i can see this i brought a magnifying glass just to demonstrate there is a warning label on there and it says and i quote do not insert swab into ear canal but see how small that is it really should be in big bold letters here but we're telling you don't do it so this is a plastic model of an ear this is called the pinna and this is the outer ear and you can use a cotton tip applicator to clean the outside the little grooves you can see some people do have as their wax is coming out they can clean that outer portion that's okay but you do not want to go putting this in here like this because you're going to push your wax in you're going to braid the surfaces and you're going to cause damage some of the things that i recommend on cleaning the ear is drop some alcohol in the ear and again as long as you don't have any ear problems or hole in your ear you can use hydrogen peroxide that tends to bubble a bit but can be used and a warm wet washcloth that you wring out well and use to clean the outside of your ear we really don't want you to over clean your ear bugs can't get inside your ears oh gross get those mattresses off the floor because no matter how clean you are those bugs could climb into your bed first of all bugs don't want to be in your ear they're they are actually afraid of us they they're private so cockroaches spiders they don't want but every once in a while they'll meander in and the ear is a blind pouch i've seen actually a spider with who's made a web inside of someone's ear canal and the thing about the cockroach is they go in but they can't turn around once they're in there there's not enough space for them to turn around and get out so what they do is they keep clawing forward against the eardrum and i don't know if you've ever seen cockroaches legs under a microscope but it's like the hairs and their hooks and so then they're scratching the eardrum and as they're scratching the eardrum the sound that's generated is horrendous and the pain is generated as horrendous so the person starts scratching at their ear and their ear starts bleeding i've seen people come into that er ripping their ear off and so i immediately know from across the room cockroach in the ear so what we do is we try to calm the person down and then you can put rubbing alcohol in the ear or mineral oil in the ear or some liquid that will actually kill the the bug and then you can suction it out cockroaches about the grossest thing that we see but you can get flying insects in there too so same sort of thing we want to drown them uh out but you know you don't have to be phobic it's pretty gross but we don't see it that frequently but if it happens to you at home try not to panic and just put rubbing alcohol or mineral oil in your ear and then go to the doctor stop a nosebleed pinch the bridge of your nose and tilt your head back no no i'm trying this out great i'm so glad he did this and this is not an offense to the school nurse they're classically told pinch up here and hold your head back and that's the exact opposite of what you should do first off the nose has a tremendous blood supply the blood supply to the nose has five arteries that meet up here in the front it's called kisselbox plexus and kistelbox plexus have arteries and veins that meet together so if you pinch the front of your nose the sidewall against the septum and hold it for five minutes and they stay upright and lean forward a little bit so that you can if some of the blood's going down the back you can spit it out but if you pinch your nose for five minutes you will stop ninety percent of nosebleeds absolutely think of it as if you had a cut on your skin you see the blood what do you do you put pressure on it pressure stops bleeding because it allows the flow to stop and then your own clotting mechanism to kick in taping your mouth shut will stop your story okay this another one i'm ripping up never tape your mouth shut i don't know how that's out there because when you're asleep you need to breathe and let's just say your nose gets blocked and congested and you've got your mouth tape shut how are you breathing so never snoring comes from many different places you're not just snoring from your mouth snoring comes from the turbulent flow of air through the respiratory system and that turbulent flow can come from your nose it can come from your mouth you can come from lower down in your throat so just taping your mouth closed is not going to fix that problem for a lot of people it's very dangerous yeah and very dangerous not recommended only loud music causes hearing loss okay only loud music how about anything loud can cause hearing loss there's different ways your ear can get damaged one is a sudden loud noise blast so let's say a firearm or a firework near the ear then there's a cumulative effect where you might have noise that's say 90 decibels or 100 decibels over time that also will start harming those cells so i'm speaking about 35 to 40 decibels right now so 80 to 90 decibels is pretty loud the more worrisome loss is that cumulative loss because people don't even realize it's happening you know you go on the subways you walk around in the city it can be really loud the construction sounds factory noises sirens all of those things can cause hearing loss so i think of loud noise as if you're looking up into the sun you don't do it right it hurts same thing loud noise blasting in your ear it harms those little inner hair cells and causes permanent hearing loss and that's such a great point once it's gone it's gone we cannot do really anything to get your hearing back once it's gone so thinking about your hearing early on in life is an important factor swimming causes ear infections all right well many people swim it's a very common human activity not everybody gets an ear infection but there is an entity called swimmer's ear swimmer's ear is when you get an overgrowth of either bacteria or fungus in the outside ear canal one of the main culprits from swimmers ear is over cleaning of your ear when you look at the ear canal this is the outer ear your ear canal is about an inch and a half long it's lined with wax glands these glands produce cerumen or wax that waterproof our ear that's one of the jobs that's why it's waxy so when people clean out their ear too much they're taking all the wax away now water's going in and when water is sitting on the skin in a dark cave the skin if you've ever had you know taken a long bath and your skin kind of changes a little bit or you've had your foot in water for a long time it changes it so that change occurs in the ear and all of a sudden this ear canal is going to start collapsing and closing and closing and closing and the germs inside start multiplying and then you get swimmer's ear which is an outer ear infection these are some of the most painful infections that we've seen and what's another big culprit for swimmers here is these things that i absolutely love but they're not great especially in the summer i think we have to make a new name your buddy you're putting this thing in your ear and what's the thing that it's doing in the summer it's making warm dark environment even warmer and darker so some things you can do to treat it at home or even preventative if you swim a lot you can use rubbing alcohol you just get an ear dropper and you can put three drops or so in your ear wiggle it around let it drain out you can also use vinegar cut it half with water you can put that in your ear as well after swimming or if you feel water stuck in your ears you should always get rid of earwax you should not get rid of your wax earwax is protection to your ear now there are circumstances where we as ear nose and throat doctors do take out the ear wax but that's when there's too much of it so in a doctor's office you might use an ear curette as the doctor will go in and pull the wax out but this is done under a microscopic guidance and incredibly gently because if you go too far in you're going to burst the eardrum or you're going to scratch the ear and it's going to bleed yeah and one of the things that we use in the office to protect the outside ear canal is we use a speculum which we put it in the outside portion of the ear canal and then we work through this little speculum to sort of protect the ear canal so these are things you just can't do at home loss of smell is only temporary well that's a big one this year yeah you know as we've gone through covid one of the big warning signs of kova 19 was loss of sense of smell and and taste associated with what happened is the virus goes into the nose and it hits those olfactory nerves which are the nerves that supply the sense of smell to our brain and the olfactory nerve sits way back here in the back of the nose so it's a really interesting place you only really smell from this back of the nose the sense of smell is probably the least appreciated of our senses but when you lose it it's devastating so some of those causes can be a head injury so our brain sits here this is the bottom of the skull and there are these little teeny tiny openings teeny tiny openings where the hair cells of the olfactory nerve go through and enter into the nose so if you get a whiplash injury your head goes like this those little hair cells can get sheared and you can have a permanent loss of sense of smell simply from a whiplash injury or a head injury some of these are permanent some are temporary so one of the things big things that we've been working on this year is olfactory training for people who've lost their sense of smell from cover 19 where those nerves have been damaged what we do is we have you get different types of smells we use essential oils and lavender eucalyptus cinnamon lemon are some of my favorites and then what you do is you use those every day and what it does it helps to retrain your brain to recognize those smells headphones are just as bad as earbuds for your hearing so there are in the ear earbuds okay i think we have an example i do i brought mine when this goes in your ear for some people if they're the type of person that makes a lot of ear wax they might be shoving their wax in so if you pull your earbud out and you see a big glob of wax you might have a big accumulation inside and that's why you're not hearing so well in addition the earbuds sitting in there for long periods of time can start hurting your ear the ear is a dark moist environment you can start getting ear infections from them the pressure of the plastic could press on the tmj or your jaw joint causing pain in your ear so those are some of the drawbacks but they do provide a nice sound quality but i try and limit myself to use them maybe an hour to a day at the most when i'm commuting back and forth to work one of the things that as ear nose and throat doctors that we like better is over-the-ear earphones so these have some real advantages they're much more comfortable they dissipate the sound so it's not that concentrated sound down into your ear canal they're not going to push that wax down into your ears so a much better choice is these over-the-ear earphones so these are the noise canceling ones what are your thoughts about these yeah so noise canceling has a few advantages it can block out the outside noise so then you don't have to blast your music over the outside noise we don't like any blasting of noise whether it be over the ear or in the ear just don't do it it's just unhealthy for your ears if you have pain in your ear you have an ear infection as an ear nose and throat doctor i probably see more non-ear related ear pain or ear caused ear pain than ear infection ear pain and the reason for that is the ear has five nerves that innervate it for sense and those nerves can give what's called referred pain from other sites someone might come in and say they have an ear infection because they have ear pain but i'll examine them and their ear is fine but where the sight of the infection is is their jaw joint they may have had a tooth extracted two weeks ago and the dentist was pulling their jaw they might have muscle tension people might grind their teeth so all of those are very common causes of ear pain and that's not from an ear infection yeah and that's a really good point because referred pain can be from anywhere it can be from the throat from deeper down another big source of ear pain is eustachian two problems and that's that drainage passage that runs from the back of the ear into the nose and all of us have experience at some point when you fly that feeling of pressure and pain in your ear your hearing's bad or you know you're having problems with your sense of smell your voice is changing don't just ignore it so if you've got some issues with your ears your nose your throat your head and neck if you feel a lump or bump you've got pain that's not going away it's probably worthwhile to get a checkup don't ignore symptoms that are lingering for more than two weeks because there could be something serious going on.