People have been cleaning their ears with cotton swabs for years. What other tools are being inadvertently used wrong?

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You're telling me not to clean my ears with swabs???? I'm sorry, but I will swear forever that they are intended for the ears. The only issue is that the makers don't want to get sued if anyone hurts themselves. I mean, c'mon, the Japanese use both ends of these in their ears! You want me to start doing that?

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- They were specifically created for cleaning ears. First line of the wikipedia history.. The reason Q-Tip says not to use them in ears is plausible deniability. They know they mostly get used to cleaning ears. But it's incredibly easy to puncture your eardrum doing that. In order to stop people from suing them for using their product in its main use case and hurting themselves, they simply specifically instruct against using it that way. While that is a wholly ridiculous falsehood, without it they'd have probably been sued so much that no one would make them. And then I wouldn't be able to clean my ears.
  
  This seems to be largely an American phenomenon, that people sue the maker of a product for themselves failing to use the product correctly, no? Or at least I can't remember a single instance outside America where either someone sued the producer for using a product incorrectly or the producer pre-emtpively puts warnings on for ridiculous stuff to not get sued if people try these things.
  Either way, good to know that cotton swabs were primarily made indeed to clean ears. I don't use them for that, but it always weirded me out when they came in those pastelle color packages with openings like tissues, perfect for a bathroom, but someone said "Yo, don't use them for your ears! They were made for swabbing grease off motor chains."
  
  Not a lot of products have to do that. The one people bandy about is McDonalds adding "Caution: Coffee Is Hot" to their stuff, but the actual coffee spill lawsuit was over coffee hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns. Few things need cautions against their intended use.
  Q-Tips / cotton swabs are an almost uniquely bad tool. It's incredibly easy to rupture your ear drums. There's no actual health benefit to swabbing your ears -- it just feels good your ears get itchy. A safer tool could be made, but it'd be more expensive, more involved to use, and there's probably several but I can't be bothered to find out, and neither can you. They make a product that they know is inherently dangerous to use and has no specific benefit. So it has a warning against doing it. Same as cigarette packs have a warning that they cause cancer, even though everyone buying them knows that and smokes them anyway.
  
  Better ear cleaning tools exist. They are little plastic scoops. I used to use a bent paperclip. Basically anything you can put into the ear canal and then pull/scoop/scrape earwax out is far better than a qtip, which only compacts wax into clumps. The one good use case for the qtip is drying. They can absorb water well inside the ear canal and belly button. I personally use them on my navel after showering since I have an "innie"
  
  I'm going crazy this goddamn thread.
  Don't shove things into your orifices. Wash your ears maybe with the help of your wet fingers under the shower. If you got fat fingers or tiny ears, maybe use cotton swabs etc on the other most area of the ear canal to clean away excess.
  Your ear is self cleaning. Dont stick anything in it.
  Like do people stuff cotton up their urethra to dry it after peeing? Leave your holes alone.
  
  I work in a call center where I wear headphones for 8 hours. I also game online and wear headphones at home for an hour or two each day. I am a very oily person. My ears DO NOT self-clean, as you say, given my situation. I use a peroxide ear drop every few weeks to cut down the buildup nowadays, then flush with an ear syringe. You can't make generalizations. People should get to know their bodies and stay healthy. If I do not do these things I just described, by the way, I start to lose hearing after a few months.
  
  See, you're describing washing them. Good.
  In ears also dont stop your ears from self cleaning, just means the final stretch has to be washed out i guess. As you do. Dont shove paperclips in there.
  And consider over/onear headphones maybe.
  People should get to know their bodies and stay healthy. If I do not do these things I just described, by the way, I start to lose hearing after a few months.
  Yes they do, through education and medical advice. Not by sticking things into their holes.
  If you got crazy buildup despite washing, you need to speak with a doctor too.
  
  I do not use in ear headphones. I believe you underestimate my oiliness.
  
  Alright. Don't advice other people to out weird shit in their ears. And go see a doctor.
  
  Nothing I said was advice.
  
  Don’t shove things into your orifices
  Don't tell me how to live my life.
  
  Flared bases!
  
  Don’t shove things into your orifices.
  BUT I HUNGER
  
  Food hole is the exception
  
  You can get soft silicone ear pickers with a built in camera now so you can see what you're scooping.
  
  Yep, somehow America wound up doing thing that way, where instead of regulating preemptively, lawsuits are expected to do a lot of what regulatory bodies do in other countries. It's an awful system and rarely benefits those that have been caused harm, especially when there are limits on punitive damages that are supposed to encourage corporations to not be shitbags. Individuals don't have the resources to sue companies, either, so at best one occasionally gets a check for $2.14 for being part of a class that won a class action lawsuit.
  
  Basically every absurd lawsuit you hear Americans do is either:
  genuinely frivolous, tossed out of court immediately, amplified to paint suing corporations as bad
  someone trying to get damages from a company which genuinely wronged them, often with life altering consequences
  Also jeez folks, clean your ears any other way, shoveling wax out of your canals with a non sterile tool regularly is asking for infections. The wax is there for a reason!
  
  Americans are giga sheep. If you want prospective of just how little they think for themselves, there was a misconfigured road in a GPS app and people kept literally driving off the road because their GPS told them to, even though it was clearly and visibly into a body of water.
  Then there's also the hilarious Apple Wave prank, where a single image tricked people into nuking their phones. What makes that prank even funnier is that it was directly inspired by the iOS update that made your phone waterproof which people also fell for.
- I've been cleaning my ears with an "ear syringe" for years. Just squirt some warm water from the faucet in there and you can hear again. Works great and is reusable. They are like 10 bucks at your local drug store.
  
  I don't like having water stuck in my ear.
  
  Water only gets stuck in your ear if you have wax built up in your ear canal. Regular washing of your ear with warm water (and nothing else!) keeps the wax build-up under control and water will just pour out of your ear canal as soon as you level your head.
  
  Pro tip if this happens, add more water.
  
  Sometimes I need a couple of more passes to unclog my ear. If I do it once and there is water stuck in my ears, it means I need to do it again. If I do it a few more times so my ear is unclogged, water will no longer be stuck in my ears.
  If your ears are clogged so severely that water alone won't help, use something like Debrox or hydrogen peroxide first to loosen your wax plug. Leave it in there for a few minutes to let the wax soften. Then follow it up with mechanical disruption from water in the ear syringe.
  If your ears are too clogged so that even that doesn't work, your clog is probably so severe that you need to see an ear, nose, and throat doctor.
  
  I've been doing this for a long time now too. So much better than anything else I've tried and you'd have to do something incredibly fucky to injure yourself.
  
  I actually got advised by my doctor to use vegetable oil for my daughter's clogged ear. A drop of oil and some massaging for 20 seconds three times a day did the the trick. Took a few days, but the clog was eventually dissolved.
  
  I use glycerin myself, but I'll have to try vegetable oil next time.
  The other thing that greatly helps speed things along is letting the oil / glycerin sit for 5-10min, then following up with an ear syringe full of warm water. Instead of spraying directly ahead, they're designed to safely spray to the sides, and the agitating motion of the water works well to clear the clog very quickly.
- Most Japanese people have dry earwax: http://drypharmacist.com/types-of-earwax.html
  Obviously this is cleaned differently compared to wet earwax.

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