How to remove ear wax and unclog your child's ear

Is your child is having trouble hearing or complaining about an earache? If so, it may be caused by wax buildup in the ear. Frank McGehee, M.D. has a simple—and kid-friendly—tip for unclogging your child’s ear.

Meet Dr. McGehee

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Transcript:

00:00:04

Hi, I'm Dr. Frank McGee from the Magnolia pediatric office and we're going to talk today about how to get earwax out of your child's ear. The importance of that is that sometimes earwax can get so blocked that the child can't hear normally.

00:00:17

More practically, if the child has a large chunk of wax in the external ear canal, the pediatrician can have trouble seeing the tympanic membrane and telling if there's an earache or not.

00:00:27

So there's a simple way to clean earwax and keep, basically keep the flow of earwax, and avoid an impaction. That involves a cotton ball and hydrogen peroxide. And what you do is put hydrogen peroxide on a cotton ball so that it is moist and you hold it to the child's ear for four or five seconds during bath time.

00:00:46

You don't have to drip or stuff the cotton ball there, you just hold it to the to the outside of the ear canal and the moisture from the hydrogen peroxide softens the wax and helps it flow out of its own accord.

00:01:00

So that's how you remove earwax or keep it flowing in a very simple way. If you have any other questions, please feel free to call our office. Thank you.