Remove earwax from your child’s ears safely

Ask-a-Doc | How to Safely Remove Earwax from Your Child's Ear | Cook Children's

How do you remove earwax from your child’s ears safely – and without fuss? Pediatrician Frank McGeHee, M.D. has the answer, and it’s easier than you might think.

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Transcript

Hi. I'm Dr. Frank McGeHee from the Magnolia pediatric office and we're going to talk today about how to get earwax out of your child's ear.

The importance of that is that sometimes their wax can get so blocked that the child can't hear normally. More practically, if the child has a large chunk of wax in the external ear canal, the pediatrician can have trouble seeing the tympanic membrane and telling if there's an earache or not.

So there's a simple way to clean earwax and keep, basically, keep the flow of earwax and avoid an impaction, that involves a cotton ball and hydrogen peroxide. And what you do is, put hydrogen peroxide on a cotton ball so that it is moist and you hold it to the child's ear for four or five seconds during bath time.

You don't have to drip or stuff the cotton ball in the ear, you just hold it to the outside of the ear canal and the moisture from the hydrogen peroxide softens the wax and helps it flow out of its own accord. So that's how you remove earwax or keep it flowing in a very simple way.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to call our office. Thank you.

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