What was a black thing that a doctor picked out of his ear when he was a child?

It should be dry and lumpy earwax, commonly known as: "ear cerumen", the scientific name of earwax is "cerurum", which is the external auditory canal, that is, the secretion in the ears and eyes, and the English name is ear wax. Its function is mainly to prevent foreign bodies from invading the eardrum, including dust, insects, and of course, earwax can also block other people's nagging when it causes embolism.

Cerumen is generally a yellowish, wax-like crumb, but also oily or relatively hard and large. So, how did Javenid come about? It turns out that there is a section of the ear and eye (L 3 cartilage segment outside the external auditory canal) that is different from the ** elsewhere in the body, that is, there is a variant of the sweat gland called the cerumen gland, and its structure is somewhat similar to the sweat gland.

The external auditory canal**, like the rest of the body**, has a sebaceous gland that secretes a type of oil. From a physiological point of view, these secretions in the cerumen gland are expelled from time to time through the opening. At first, the secretions that have just been spit out from the cerumen glands look a bit like melted wax, and they mix with the oil excreted by the sebaceous glands to form a thin layer attached to the surface of the **.

These primitive earwax are mixed with the dust in the ear canal and the debris that fall off, and after drying, they become a small piece of pale yellow loose flake cerumen and accumulate in the ear canal. Some people secrete a lot of cerumen glands and sebaceous glands, and the discharge is brownish-yellow, oily viscous substance, which has accumulated in the eyes of the outer tract before drying, and some even flow out of the ear, and some condense into a clump, which is collectively called soft earwax, commonly known as "oily ear", and is called oily cerumen in medicine. There are also some people who have particularly strong cerumen gland secretion; The earwax cannot be discharged again, and gradually dries and gathers into dark brown hard lumps, sometimes hard like stones, tightly blocked in the external ear canal, commonly known as hard earwax, medically called cerumen embolism.

If you find that there is cerumen embolism, especially after the ear canal is flooded, the cerumen swelling causes ear stuffiness, hearing loss or even ear pain, you should consult a specialist for treatment, and do not dig indiscriminately, so as not to cause ear canal inflammation.

There are two types of earwax, "dry" and "wet", and most of the earwax of East Asians, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean people, is dry. Africans, including North Americans, have 97% of their earwax wet, while South Asians have the same half. Native Americans, like East Asians, probably migrated from East Asia across the Bailing Strait to the Americas.

A recent issue of the journal Nature Genetics published an in-depth study of earwax by Japanese people, and the discovery of genes that determine the dryness and wetness of earwax is of far-reaching significance. The study also found that people with wet earwax are more likely to sweat and often have a smell in the body, especially under the armpits, which is also the main reason for the development of the perfume industry in Europeans, which is determined by the earwax gene. East Asians may be freezing, their bodies are self-protecting, they sweat less, even their earwax is blown dry, and finally their genes change.

On the other hand, it is not clear whether you can indirectly understand whether the person has armpit odor by looking at the dryness and wetness of the person's earwax.

Although earwax is not big and not very functional, if you study it carefully, there is still a lot of knowledge in it.