Hydrogen Peroxide for Ear

H2O2, also known as hydrogen dioxide or hydrogen peroxide, is something you will often find in your medicine cabinet at home, and if you don’t already have some, perhaps it’s about time you invested. It has many different uses, although using hydrogen peroxide for ear problems has become popular, and it’s a compound that is naturally found in the human body.

What is Hydrogen Peroxide?

When you buy hydrogen peroxide, it’s usually a clear liquid, sometimes tinged with blue, and although it is a highly reactive chemical, it’s easily bought over the counter. You will find it’s also inexpensive, making it understandable why it is used in so many home remedies for various things, including ear problems and pain.

Hydrogen Peroxide for Ear – Warnings

Before you start to use any home remedies, and especially with hydrogen peroxide for ear concerns, you should always consult a medical professional, such as your local physician. The last thing you will want to do is make your health complaint worse, and there are times where using something you would have in your medicine cabinet at home can actually cause more harm than good. If you have fluid, other discharge, or a lot of pain, or you’re experiencing problems for a long time, using a home remedy might be the best option, and in these cases we would always suggest asking a doctor for some information first. It might be that you need antibiotics or similar medication.

You might not want to use hydrogen peroxide for ear problems if you have sensitive skin. The highly reactive chemical compound can cause bleaching, and also irritation to the areas on which it has been applied. If this is the case, you should cease using it immediately. We would recommend performing a patch test before starting any home remedies, especially with dangerous chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide.

Hydrogen Peroxide for Ear – Benefits

There are a number of occasions in which using hydrogen peroxide for ear concerns can prove beneficial. If you have just had your ears pierced, for example, you can use hydrogen peroxide to help, not just with the healing process, but also to ensure that infection is kept at bay. Whenever you have a new piercing, the risk of infection is quite high, and this compound helps to counteract that.

There is an old wives tale that using hydrogen peroxide in your ears could help to keep things such as cold and flu at bay, and although there isn’t any concrete evidence to support the theory either way, people do have success when using a couple of these drops into the ears. It might be because the peroxide is able to get through to the nasal canal and kill off any viruses and bacteria. Either way, some people swear by it as a way to stop getting flu and colds, and also to help make them less severe too.

You can treat an ear infection with the help of hydrogen peroxide, and you can also use the fluid to help remove was build-up from inside your ears. For the latter, a few drops inserted into the ear can help to soften any wax in there, making it easier to remove it. Because the liquid works very well at killing off bacteria, that’s where the ear infection treatment comes into play.

Hydrogen Peroxide for Ear – Uses

If you do want to use hydrogen peroxide to help make your ears better, either because of pain, infection, or a build-up of wax, there are many ways in which you can do just that. If you want to get rid of ear wax, simple drop a few drops of hydrogen peroxide into your ear canal, laying on the opposite ear – such as with your head on the bed. A towel can be used to mop up any spillages, and you may also want to have some kitchen towel handy. After a few moments, head on over to the sink. You will need a bulb aspirator for this step, and some warm water. The trick is to flush the water gently through the ear, encouraging any of that waxy build-up to come out.

The same technique can be used for ear infections also – simply place a few drops of the peroxide into the ear, wait a few moments, and then use a bulb aspirator to flush all the bad bugs and wax out.

For other concerns, such as pierced ears, you’ll want to take a slightly different approach. You can place some of the peroxide into a cotton wool ball or Q-Tip before dabbing the affected area, and you can do this two or three times per day to encourage healthy, happy, and quick healing.

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