Could Poking Your Eardrum with a Q-Tip Cause Any Damage to the Inner Ear?

Well, I do use the spoon shaped ear curette on myself to remove wax. Been doing it for years now

 

That's not something I'd recommend doing.

 

Hmm, I'll try to slowly stop then. It shouldn't have caused any issues with my hearing, should it?

 

At some point the wax has to be removed. Or you become one of those people who have visible wax in their ears.
I don't know why someone would use a cotton swab to push wax down into their ear. The proper technique is a circular, rotation motion to transfer the wax from the walls of the ear to the cotton.
Any problems resulting from cotton swab use is most likely user error.
Notice how the finger fits right in the ear? We evolved to clean our ears (and noses) with our fingers. So don't go any deeper than that and you should be fine.

 

Wax does have a useful purpose in your body. There can be issues in some cases, of medical nature, but as a general statement, there is no health related requirement to get rid of your wax.

You're worrying about a cosmetic issue. Once the wax has reached the outside of the canal, you can gently pick it up or wash it down, as it already played its role in the canal.

Unless you have a specific medical condition calling for it, it is unnecessary to remove the wax from your ear canal: when you do, you're removing something that is designed to keep your ear healthy.

Perhaps, but it's an easy error to make given that there is no way to get feedback about how close you are getting to the ear drum. Also, the result is often a compaction of wax near the ear drum, in spite of using the aforementioned motion, making the situation worse.

If you can reach your ear drum with your finger you should know it is not the norm. We can generally reach the outside of the canal that interfaces with the pinna, where it's safe to clean the wax that you are unhappy about being seen. Perhaps that's what you mean. That's a very different reach from the reach provided by instruments like a curette or a q-tip (which can reach the ear drum).

 

@GregCA I think we're in agreement, there is no reason to go deeper than the finger can go. Perhaps I should have put that first.

 

Did your spike from the q-tip go down?