HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — To most Westerners, the idea of paying someone to stick little scoops and tweezers into their ears is downright unnerving. To Vietnamese, it’s an art. Though the procedure ...

Most of us have the habit of using a cotton swab or an ear bud to remove wax from the ear. While doing so, we seldom stop to think if the ear bud could actually be causing more harm than good.

Q-Tips; cotton swabs; ear buds; whatever you know them as, most of us have stuck one of those little fluffy-ended paper sticks in our ears at some point in our lives. Japan, though, has a rather ...

If there's one thing more satisfying than picking one's nose, it's shoving a finger or Q-tip deep into your ear canal and emerging with that big hunk of wax which has been muffling your hearing for ...

Digging for gold. That’s what my dad used to call the act of jamming a cotton swab in the ear canal and fishing around for wax. Despite the tsk-tsking of otolaryngologists, most of whom caution ...