When I saw this video, I remembered the countless times I removed different kinds of insect in the ears of a lot of people at the Jose Reyes Medical Center's Emergency Room. These were the cases that we usually attended to especially in the wee hours of the morning, with patients claiming "something" crawled up in their ear while they were sleeping. I have removed cockroaches, wasps, moths and even worms! I remember one case where a mentally challenged individual was brought to us complaining of movements inside his ear, and on otoscopy and endoscopy, we saw several moving "fruit" worms in his middle ear! We had to bring him to the operating room to put him under sedation to be able to remove the worms.
A colleague of mine reported once that he removed several live and feeding ticks in 2 sisters who had a shihtzu sharing their bed. He also had an experience of removing live maggots in the one ear canal which burrowed in the middle ear!
It may be so "gross" to some and unthinkable to many but these cases do happen and here are some tips you might want to know just in case it happens to someone close and there's no doctor around.
1. Remain calm. It is a scary situation but you have to focus on the task at hand.
2. Assess the object to see if it can be easily seen in the ear canal and be removed. Pull the ear upward and backwards to better visualize the canal. Use a flashlight for a better lighting.
3. Insects/objects that can be easily seen can be grasped with tweezers and pulled out gently. Remember to have the person or child stay very still while you remove the object.
4. Gravity can also help dislodge the foreign body so you can tilt the head to one side and gently shake the head until the object falls.
5. Flushing the object out of the ear by using boiled, but cooled down, water may also help to remove the object. Use a bulb syringe to suck up the water, tilt head to the side over a bowl, squeeze the water into the ear canal and let the water flush and drain out from the ear canal. You may have to do this more than one time, and should only be done when object is really small.
6. Just like in the video above, removing insects that may have crawled or flown into the ear can be accomplished by pouring warmed mineral, olive, or baby oil into the ear canal. After the oil is poured into the ear canal, let it stay in the ear for a few minutes and then tilt the head over a bowl, allowing the oil to drain out. This process may need to be repeated until the insect flushes out of the ear or you can do step number 5 to facilitate the insect removal.
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