by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.
A lady explained:
Last night, all of a sudden my ear began itching so I took my hearing aid off and with my little finger I was scratching in my ear canal. When I put my hearing aid back on, it started to give feedback all the time. This morning I’m still getting enormous feedback when I put my aid in. It’s driving me crazy. What can I do?
There are two likely causes of your feedback. The good news is they are both easy to fix.
When you were scratching your ear, you likely dislodged a piece of wax (or other debris) and either one of two things happened.
One, the dislodged wax is now blocking your ear canal, so when you put your hearing aid in, the wax butted up against the hole in the ear mold, basically blocking it. The result is feedback. It’s basically the same thing as your hearing aid squealing when you cup your hand around it. This is not as true of modern aids that have feedback suppression.
Two, when you put your hearing aid on, you pushed the wax into the hole in the ear mold—again causing the feedback.
The first thing to check is your ear mold. If any wax is blocking the hole, clean it out. That should fix your problem.
If the ear mold hole is clear, then you likely need to clean out your ear canal. When we wear hearing aids, the body’s natural action to work wax and anything else in our ear canals out over time is prevented by the ear mold. Thus, each time we put in our hearing aids, we push wax further into the ear canal until it completely blocks it.
Therefore, it is a good idea to have your ears regularly cleaned out to prevent this from happening again in the future.
Epilogue: This lady went to her ear doctor, and he found her ear canal was completely plugged with wax. Cleaning out her ear canal instantly solved the feedback problem.
Does plugging up the ear canal with a hearing aid create wax build up? Seems this happened to me. When I got checked initially for hearing aids, both ear canals were relatively free of wax. Wore the hearing aids for a few months and started to notice wax build up issues, creating problems with fitting and feedback sounds.
Hi Bob:
I answered this in another comment you made under a different article, but I’ll repeat it here again in case someone else wants to know the answer.
Ear wax build-up has two aspects. First, wearing hearing aids prevents the normal ear wax from coming out of your ear canals–so it is stuck in there and can tend to build up. Thus, you may need to clean your ears out much more often. (I do it daily to keep my ears clean.)
Second, ear molds/hearing aids may tend to irritate your ear canals and thus your ears produce more ear wax, so you indeed have more than you used to have.
The two together can really block your ears fast. So you need a regular program of getting the wax out so your hearing aids don’t clog up and not work well, and so you can hear properly.
Cordially,
Neil