How to UNCLOG Your Plugged Ears...FAST!

Hi guys. Cliff Olson, Doctor of Audiology and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions in Phoenix, Arizona. And in this video, I'm going to help you figure out why your ears are clogged and show you how to fix it in as little as 15 minutes. Coming up. A few years ago, driving back to Phoenix from Flagstaff, Arizona, after vacation, my left ear started to feel clogged. The elevation in Flagstaff is around 7,000 feet, and the elevation in Phoenix is close to sea level. Now, if you've ever changed elevation quickly, like driving in the mountains or flying in an airplane, you know that the pressure changes can cause a lot of ear pain. If this happens to you, it could be a very quick and simple fix that only takes around five seconds. All you have to do is plug your nose and blow like this. What you'll notice is the air will go into your middle ear space and it will unclog your ears.

This is called the Valsalva Maneuver. Now, if the Valsalva maneuver does not work for you, you can repeat it again, but swallow at the same time. That's called the Lowry Maneuver, and usually this will fix the problem. However, going back to my trip from Flagstaff to Phoenix, I was doing both of these maneuvers and none of them were working. My left ear continued to feel clogged. Fortunately, when I got back down to Phoenix, I was able to go into my clinic because as an audiologist, I'm able to actually do some testing on myself to figure out what's actually going on. Now, if you're not an audiologist yourself, I wouldn't recommend trying to self-diagnose, but I was able to figure out that it wasn't the pressure change at all. I was able to use my video otoscope to look into my left ear canal, and lo and behold, it was earwax causing the problem.

As it turned out, that feeling of fullness and being clogged inside of my left ear was not due to a plugged ear from a pressure change. It wasn't due to eustachian tube dysfunction. It was due to a plug of earwax giving me a 30 decibel hearing loss that made me feel clogged. It was just a coincidence that when I was going from 7,000 feet down to zero feet in elevation, that my ear became clogged with earwax at the exact same time. Now, I didn't know this back then, but it should have been obvious to me at the time. You see, when I was performing the Valsalva Maneuver and the Lowry Maneuver, I was able to feel my ears pop, but it wasn't getting rid of the clogged sensation in my left ear. In fact, there's a lot of people who incorrectly self-diagnose the cause of their clogged ears, and instead of it being a pressure related issue, it ends up being an earwax related issue.

I could have plugged my nose and blown as hard as I possibly could to pop the eyeballs out of my head when really at the end of the day, that was never going to do anything because of all of the earwax that I had accumulated at that time inside of my left ear. The sensation of being clogged in one or both of your ears due to earwax is more common than you may think. Approximately 5% of adults in the United States has a significant amount of earwax inside of their ear canal, and this means around 13 million people in the United States alone. So if you happen

to have impacted wax inside of your ear canal making you feel clogged, what can you actually do about it? Well, you could go ahead and give a clinic like mine a call to have that earwax professionally removed, or you could just head over to your local Walgreens, CVS, or pharmacy, or even go onto the link that I have in the description of this video and get yourself some Earwax MD by Eosera, today's video sponsor, and do it yourself. Earwax MD is the exact same solution that a lot of hearing care professionals will use to professionally remove stubborn earwax out of your ear canals. Why? Because it works. And chances are, by the time earwax has had the opportunity to build up inside of your ear canal enough to block off your entire ear canal, it's been in there for a while, and just using water with a cotton swab is not going to get it out.

To get the wax out and unclog your ear, all you have to do is fill up your ear canal with Earwax MD, leave it in there for 15 minutes, and let it do its thing. Then take some warm water and rinse out your ear using a bulb syringe, or even better, the Wax Blaster MD spray bottle, to flush the solution out of your ear as well as the earwax. In as little as 15 minutes, Earwax MD can often break down even the most stubborn cases of earwax impaction. Just look at this time-lapse video of Earwax MD on your right compared to a leading carbimide peroxide solution on the left. As you can see, the active ingredients of glycolic acid combined with sodium and potassium bicarbonate completely destroy the earwax while the carbonide peroxide solution does almost nothing. If earwax is the cause of your clogged ear, then getting that earwax out will almost immediately solve the problem for you.

If I had a dollar for every time that a viewer of my channel had a clogged ear due to earwax, I would be a multimillionaire at this point. But the point here is don't make me a millionaire. Take your 20 bucks and get the earwax out of your ears yourself. And if you're unsuccessful, then reach out to an audiologist so we can professionally remove that earwax because that's what we're specifically trained to do. If you're anything like me, you want to unclog your ears as quickly as humanly possible because it can be extremely annoying and even painful. So if you want this done fast, then you need to correctly identify what is causing your clogged ears and take the proper steps necessary to solve the problem yourself. And if earwax happens to be the cause of your clogged ears like it is for millions of other people out there, then you need to get rid of that earwax as fast as possible.