Professionals Give Piercing Insights on Ear Anomalies
We’ve all read plenty about the possible medical drawbacks of tongue piercing. But even staid old ear piercings can cause odd and bothersome things to happen sometimes.
A friend of mine, for instance, found with fascination that her own ear flesh--on one ear, not the other--started growing around the small ring she was wearing, almost as if her body was trying to engulf the foreign object. (She had the growth cut off, allowed the hole to heal and never dared pierce that ear again.)
And a girl I know who recently had her ears pierced found that the position of the hole in one ear started migrating downward. She took the earring out (within a whisker of the hole reaching the end of her lobe and the earring clattering onto the floor) and now she has an interesting vertical scar on that ear, marking the path that the earring hole took.
Why did these things happen? We called Dr. Irwin Harris, a UCLA ear specialist, to get some answers.
My first friend, he said, may well have had an infection that caused a growth called a granuloma: Timely treatment with antibiotic ointments could have remedied the problem. Alternatively, as the ear healed from the pierce, a kind of overgrowth of scar tissue--called keloid scarring--could have occurred, a condition treated these days with a steroid injection (or irradiation, in extreme cases).
As for my second friend, her problem was mechanical. Her earlobe simply didn’t have the strength to support the weight of her earring. Harris sees such things in older patients too. One lady he knows “loved to wear very heavy earrings and her earlobes now look like spaghetti--both ears have multiple strands where the earrings cut through the skin.” Correcting this would take plastic surgery.
Harris isn’t saying “don’t pierce your ears!”--but he is suggesting people keep an eye on their ears and get problems seen to swiftly. Heavy earrings supported by thin wires, he adds, are more likely to cause problems than lighter ones with thicker studs (it’s physics, pure and simple). And soaking studs in 70% rubbing alcohol for 10 minutes before inserting them can cut down on the risk of infection.
Finally, he says, piercing the hard, gristly parts of the ear is much more likely to lead to problems because cartilage--since it doesn’t have a good blood supply--is less able to fight off infection.
All this ear stuff pales, of course, in comparison to the tongue-piercing risks. Included in the list: cracking a tooth from champing down too hard on metal jewelry (which wouldn’t particularly be a problem for me--I rarely bite my tongue) and bacterial infection (the mouth, after all, is a seething breeding ground for all kinds of bugs that can get into the pierce wound). Tongue jewelry, we’re also informed, can cause swelling of the mouth (potentially blocking the airways), can interfere with clear speech and can even choke you if it gets loose. The American Dental Assn. frowns mightily on pierced tongues.
I have four holes in my ears. But a tongue post? Call me a weenie, but I think I won’t do it.
*
Well, Isn’t That
. . . Interesting
Another body part--the armpit--has also been in the news lately. We learn from the Webzine salon.com that British psychologists who study armpit odor have recently reported that ugly men would be much more attractive to women if those women could only smell their armpits.
Really?
Pheremones are the cause, explains researcher Nick Neave of the University of Northumbria: smelly chemicals given off by peoples’ bodies, armpits among them. But less-than-gorgeous-looking men should hold off before trying this tactic, explains the article at https://www.salon.com, since the effect seems to work best if the women are at the right phase of their menstrual cycle and aren’t taking the pill.
As a woman, I caution that inquiring about these things of any woman in whom you’re interested will not meet with a good response--so the finding, though fascinating, isn’t eminently practical. Try smarts and wit instead.
