If its basically a straight shot from your outer ear to the ear drum, how does water get ‘stuck’ in your ear after swimming?
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Also not all ear canals are created equal. I probably should have had tubes in my ears but they were testing an antibiotic at the time so my broke ass parents went with that. (not upset!).
But I was like 21 when the doc went “you see that picture on the wall of how the ear canal goes? … yours looks nothing like that.” He was a really good and funny doc, had him for a good decade.
He said my ears did U shape canal. I tried once to call around to find out how to keep from getting swimmers ear from chlorine pool… they all say try this… well this HURT like hell and had me jumping around like an idiot after just one ear. Looked at the little bottle again and it said “Stop use if it causes pain” or something like that. I’m like NO SHIT SHERLOCK. Issue was I had ruptured eardrums. Two on one and one on the other when I was a kid.
A bonus story is I knew I had swimmers ear and went to urgent care after work. The doc goes “Oh, that ones been perforated, and is clearly infected, lets see what the healthy side looks like… oh that one is perforated too.”.
The force of gravity isn’t enough to overcome the surface tension of the water. Shaking your head increases the force on the water, which might overcome the surface tension. Adding rubbing alcohol disrupts hydrogen bonding in the water, weakening the surface tension.
To add to the explanation with the closed straw, water exhibits a property called capillary action. In tubes significantly smaller than a standard drinking straw, the surface tension is so high relative to the volume of water in the tube that the water will climb the tube against the force of gravity.
Same way water gets “stuck” in a syringe or any other narrow tube, I think. Surface tension holds it onto the edges and it’s not easy for it to dry out.
One thing not mentionned is that water can easily get trapped if you have partial cerumen plugs in your ears.
Not hard to explain at all. Put a straw into a glass of water and put a finger to close one end. As you pull the straw out of the water, you’ll see the water inside the straw is not coming out. Two reasons:
1. Once water reaches the ear drum, it can’t come out easily because there’s no air coming from behind (thru the ear drum). This is vacuum suction.
2. Water has surface tension. That’s why water forms droplets and not falling flat on a table for example. Together with point #1, it gets stuck to the wall of the ear, creating perfect vacuum suction.
You can put in a few drops more and once you hear whooshing sound, just immediately flip your ear down. Adding more drops will pull water surface tension away from ear wall toward the new drops, so it leaves an air gap to allow air to get behind the ear.
You ever take a straw out of a drink and there’s a pocket of soda left in it? Your ear is basically a straw that goes through your head. Surface tension in an enclosed space keeps it there.
It’s like Ketchup in the bottle. You have a small tube filled with water and the only way to get the water out is to get some air into the bottle behind the liquid.
Get a straw, stick it in water, cover the top end with your finger and lift the straw, thats why.
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