> for what purpose do they serve?

It feels good to scoop the goop out of your ears after a hot shower.

I'm someone who naturally produces a lot of ear wax. I don't think people really appreciate just how unpleasant it is. After it builds up past a certain point, sounds become distorted and it's hard to decode individual words. It can often be extremely itching and irritating.

When i was young my doctor would repeatedly sternly talk to my mother that she must clean my ears out, as the doctor thought she was ignoring me and/or my ears.

She cleaned them regularly. I was a ear wax machine, to an absurd degree.

Luckily as an adult they're pretty normal...i assume. But i still clean them after i get out of the shower since i dislike the feeling of water in my ears.

I think those of us with hearing loss can appreciate the unpleasantness pretty well.

Use an ear syringe. So much more effective and, to my knowledge, no one has raised serious safety concerns.

Exactly this. Use a syringe and inject hot (but not too hot) water into your ear with your head tilted. Do this a couple of times. Then you should use a paper tissue and your finger to get it out what you can. Repeat.

I dunno if this is a good advice, but it worked every time I got excessive build-up.

Some people just tilt their head to the right side in case it is their right ear and aim the shower head at their ear for some time. Sometimes it can just "fall out" (really, seen it happen!). Regardless, I just do the syringe one and paper tissue + finger.

I recommend one of these:

https://earclear.com/

Thank you for this recommendation. My ears have been acting up again, so I ordered this as soon as I saw your comment. It took a couple showers, but I can hear again! This thing works.

I'm sorry, but $59 for a plastic syringe with a crooked tip?

They last forever, and they work much better than anything else on the market. Worth every penny.

I absolutely agree to that. However, the boxes of all brands I've seen state to not use inside the ear. I skull-fuck myself almost daily (unless I run out) and my doctor merely praises me for having such clean ears. Even if I go weeks without using a Q-Tip in the ear, they still come out only barely dirty. I mostly just do it because it feels great. I can understand how if you have thick wax buildup it could be packing the wax deeper in, but for me that's not the case. When I insert the Q-Tip, I feel the cotton making direct contact with skin the whole way in.

I'm the same as you, but the past two three years, my ears dry from using a q-tip. I literally start to have cracked dry skin and bleeding in my ear canal from excessive q-tip usage and these days I can't even use them weekly without issues.

I have never felt the need to scoop anything out of my ears. And I don't see anything visible from the outside of the ear that would need scooping. I assume any wax further in the ear probably belongs there as defensive barrier.

I never do either, until I grab a pair of in ear headphones and recoil in horror at the globs of ear wax that they yank out. I have actually killed apple earbuds like that from clogging up the mesh barriers with wax. Regular maintenance keeps that from happening.

You need rubbing alcohol - any Jesus ;D

Physiology varies quite a bit.

Especially for users of in-ear speakers. Nasty as heck using them with dirty ears.

There’s also publication bias.

Maybe they’ve done the research and decided against making it public because it wasn’t what they wanted to see.

Just sell off the product line, destroy all that research/shuffle the researchers around, and the acquirer is none-the-wiser.

But they were sure to erase any anatomical hole depictions on the packaging.

I always operated under the assumption that it was just safer for them from a liability standpoint. Between the risk of somebody unable to properly handle the physical feedback loop and/or respect for their anatomy required to safely clean one's ears, the risk of a strand of cotton getting stuck in some wax and somehow turning into a weird infection... just a lot to go wrong.

People still buy them for cleaning their ears, so at least a subset of their sales are not research dependent. One cynical hypothesis would be that they tried to prove they were beneficial, failed, and that’s why we have an absence of research to that point.

It also could be just as the original poster mentioned, maybe no one has really felt like the investment to ask the question would be worth it.

Doing a good research study would be expensive. At the end, people would either: see a good outcome, and keep doing what they're doing (sticking Q-tips in their ears), or a bad outcome, and buy fewer Q-tips.

So, probably not much of an incentive.

I think this understates how many people could be avoiding q-tips because they're potentially bad. A good outcome of a study could have a material impact on sales.

I honestly doubt it. The unpleasant sensation of having my ears filled with goop is far stronger than any caution advised on the package. And those who don't experience this don't have a reason to use them, even if they are advertised as safe.