A gruesome video has revealed how it looks inside the ear of someone who hasn’t cleaned the wax or dirt out for 15 years.
The four-minute clip shows a metal tool probing and scraping around inside a woman’s ear canal and fishing out chunks and flakes of wax.
The doctor performing the procedure said the woman, who is not named, had not cleaned her ears for 15 years because she was afraid of getting water in them.
But she was complaining she could no longer hear, which it became clear was because so much wax had built up inside her ear canal.
The woman, who had not cleaned her ears in 15 years, visited a clinic in the Phu Tho Province in the north of Vietnam, where a doctor removed the build-up of wax and dirt in a matter of minutes
During the video the narrow ear tunnel is clogged full of crusty-looking chunks which, when pulled out and put onto a tissue on the doctor’s table, appear to add up to the size of a grape.
The doctor, named only as Tuan, treated the patient at his clinic in the Phu Tho Province in the north of Vietnam.
The woman reportedly said the procedure, which Dr Tuan filmed with a tiny camera, was painful but it only took a few minutes for the dirt to be removed.
So much wax and dirt had built up she said she couldn’t hear traffic outside the office when she met Dr Tuan.
It appears as a black, brown and yellow rocky-looking substance when filmed on a television in the doctor’s office.
After everything had been removed, Dr Tuan instructed the woman on how she should clean her ears properly in future.
Everybody has wax in their ears – the body produces it to protect the sensitive ear canal from dirt and foreign objects which could damage it.
It usually falls out of its own accord but, if it starts to build up, it can be removed using water or oils. The NHS recommends people don’t use cotton buds to clean their ears.
If your ear is blocked you may find you get earache, itching, difficulty hearing, or dizziness.
When the wax is removed from the woman’s ear and placed on the doctor’s table it looks like a black and brown rocky substance adding up to a pile approximately the size of a grape