How does ear wax affect coordination and balance?

Although ear wax is a natural barrier against harm, helping deter infections and keep your sense of hearing healthy, it is not uncommon for a blockage to occur. What may be slightly more unexpected is how this can affect your pseudo-senses, such as your sense of balance and coordination. Let’s look at this in more detail.

How can ear wax affect balance and coordination?

Our ear, outside of hearing, houses the vestibular system, which detects any changes in your head’s movement or your body’s position. As it is a delicate and precise system, the slightest disturbance, such as a buildup of earwax, can cause major reverberations within your body’s sense of balance.

Earwax can apply excessive pressure to your eardrum, leading to that uncomfortable feeling of ‘fullness’ within the ear canal; in turn, this can cause dizziness. It can also lead to sounds being blocked out, which affects your orientation and general coordination, compounding any balance issues.

Finally, too much earwax can have the opposite effect to its intended purpose, developing into a bacteria breeding ground. Infections can cause inflammation of the inner ear, in turn affecting your vestibular system.

Solutions

Our best advice for ear wax blockages is to seek professional help from an audiologist. These people know your ears even better than you, and the risk of adverse effects and complications is removed in a professional setting. For ear wax removal Swindon, professional hearing experts such as https://www.earwax.co.uk/ear-wax-removal-near-me/swindon/ can help.

If you insist on unblocking your ears singlehandedly, we can give you the best and safest choices, starting with ear massages. These are self-explanatory, but make sure not to be too forceful; instead, gently ease the earwax out, unlodging the blockage with rotations of the ear and massaging the area around it.

Ear irrigation can help to quickly flush out ear blockages. You can buy specialist solutions over the counter, which only require a few drops and you lay on your side to let them get to work. Natural oils, such as olive oil, can be equally effective.