17 Feb How many times have we told you?

DON’T PUT Q-TIPS IN YOUR EAR!!!

The statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, gets its annual spring cleaning on April 12, 1995. From The Atlantic, which has more historic photos of the memorial. (Denis Paquin / AP)

Update: From the Washington Post:

Q-tips are one of the most perplexing things for sale in America. Plenty of consumer products are widely used in ways other than their core function — books for leveling tables, newspapers for keeping fires aflame, seltzer for removing stains, coffee tables for resting legs — but these cotton swabs are distinct. Q-tips are one of the only, if not the only, major consumer products whose main purpose is precisely the one the manufacturer explicitly warns against.

Contrarian’s reaction to this is the same as it is to all safety concerns: Think of the children!

Update II:  From NPR [No idea why my feed is suddenly full of Q-tip handwringing]:

SEABROOK: Dr. Fitzgerald, why does it feel so good to clean your ears?

Dr. DENNIS FITZGERALD (Otologist): Well, there’s probably two answers to the question. The first answer, and probably the most common reason that people like to get a Q-tip into their ear, is that they’ve already cleaned all of the wax out of their ear. And wax is a protective component of our ear canals, so that once you clean all the wax out, then the ear starts to itch.

SEABROOK: OK. So that tells me why people do it in the first place.

Dr. FITZGERALD: Right.

SEABROOK: Why does it feel so good?

Dr. FITZGERALD: Well, there are a lot of nerve endings in the ear. And a lot of those nerves are hooked up to other parts of our body, especially internal organs. Certain nerves that are in the skin of the ear canal connect to the intestinal organs.

From there, the conversation quickly segues into the role ear canals played in Roman vomitoria. Seriously.