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Comment by fortuna86 | Hacker News Reader

Be careful, my ear doctor said these things cause wax build up and create problems in the long term, not just hearing.

That doesn't make any sense. They just sit in the outside of your ear. Nowhere near where earwax is produced.

There are other brands of in-ear headphones that you jam into your ear canal more like earplugs. Possibly those could have an effect. But AirPods Pro are nothing like that.

AirPods Pro are in ear, they compound the issue of earwax on your outer ear into a worse problem. That's according to me ear doctor, feel free to argue further with me but that's what he said.

Interesting. I would believe there is more ear wax when I use them a lot. Does that not reverse to ordinary levels when they are not used? What problems does this (or other non-hearing issues) create?

I agree that we need to be mindful of rapid and dramatic changes to how we interface with the world, since our bodies may not react well in the long run.

I think it's more a case of constant ear bud usage packing in the wax and concentrating it. It got so bad for me, even the water tool they have at my doctor's office didn't work to remove it.

I have terrible wax issues from before I used in ear headphones, mostly from swimming. I have found an earwax cleaning kit called Earwax MD and it works great for me. The peroxide based kits didn’t remove my wax and I needed to do periodic ENT appointments to scrape it out when it got impacted. This Earwax MD formula really eats away the wax and dries it out so that it can be rinsed out or fall out on its own.

And before anyone raises a stink about this being bad for my ears, I become functionally deaf when my earwax gets impacted which happens about once ever 2 years.

Whoa, not good! I assume they found another way to get it out? Did they have any tips (aside from not using earbud-style headphones) to prevent the issue from recurring?

They sent me home with a solution to eat away at the wax, then tried again with the machine 2 weeks later.

Doctor said he sees this all the time, and ear buds are to blame.

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