Ears That Keep Getting Infected

I might have to try that with the cream. I usually clean my ears twice a day too.

What I've been doing lately is hydrogen peroxide since my ears are leaking out junk. And then I put a paper towel in between my ear and the gold ball on the front of the earring to prevent my ear from sticking to it. For some reason, my ear won't get stuck to the paper towel. Plus, that helps to keep my ear dry even when it is leaking stuff out.

are you sure hydrogen peroxide is good for the wounds? use very low concentration of it if you need to use it. i prefer something milder but usually i just let it dry and heal and apply diluted antiseptic solution if needed

Hydrogen peroxide takes care of the dead tissue and junk that builds up. I am only using 3% hydrogen peroxide however, so it is a very weak solution.

Well I think the cream is very important. The Alcohol/ Hydrogen peroxide does the cleaning and that's it. It doesn't protect and help the wound heal. The antibacterial cream would do the protecting of the wound to prevent it for further infections since your ear can't stay clean all day even though you cleaned it once. The bacteria/ dirt somehow always finds its way there. It is always good to have some protection.:)

Good luck! I wish you all the best!
-Cara

Thanks! I am trying the cream now and my ears seem to be getting a bit better. I am also trying to let them heal with silver in instead of gold incase that was the problem.

You're welcome. I hope it continues to heal well.

Cheers for the best response!:)

I've been wearing only the 24K for over 3 months now and my one ear cleared up, but the other is still infected.

You know, you may be onto something with the silver though... I have a few pairs of silver earrings and I've noticed that I never get infected ears wearing silver. Maybe I should stop wasting money buying gold.

there you go, wear the silver for ones for a month, ive known a couple of ppl that cant wear gold for long before they get infected, but i cant remember hearing anybody say anything about reacting badly to silver.

Rhodium is probably good because it is very similar to platinum. Rhodium is often used to coat white gold or silver earrings. I'll try some of my silver earrings that are coated with rhodium to see if that helps.

Was it a cartilage hole? I always wanted one of those, but now I realize I'd definitely never get one.

Thankfully, the paper towels seem to be helping my ears a little bit as of now. But I don't want to speak too soon because they're still leaking out junk.

Oh no. I'm not brave enough to get a cartilage. There is no room for error in getting one of those and I just don't trust anyone to do it LOL.

I hope you have good luck! I'm glad that you found something to help:)

Yeah, I guess my ears aren't allergic to paper towel.:)

I'm almost wondering if plastic earrings might help or something. I've seen those. But I'm allergic to latex so I'm not sure if they are actual plastic or if they are some type of latex derivative. I couldn't wear a retainer after I got my braces off because I was allergic to that.

I don't have a whole lot of allergies, but it seems like I always get the worst ones. The funny thing is, for the longest time I never even wanted pierced ears. Now I don't really want them either, but I know there will just be a scar there now which would be worse than the constant infections. Plus, I have already spent thousands of dollars on earrings.

WOW! That's a lot of money on earrings! I bet they're beauties!!

Plastic ones could be a good possibility. I would be great if they could let you know now what kind of plastic though they are...with the amount of people who are allergic to latex it looks like they would be more upfront about those things.

I'm allergic to penicillin and anything even remotely related...sucks for me! That's about all I'm allergic to aside from smoke. And that's very, very minor.

I thought I wasn't allergic to any medications until I got pneumonia and had to take some new thing. Luckily, the -cillin drugs are okay for me because that's what I ended up begging for as I was afraid to try anything new after that.

I don't wear plated gold, I cannot wear cheap costume jewelry. All of my earrings are either gold or silver.

I am letting the wound heal, but of course, with the earring still in (otherwise, it is no longer going to be pierced).

I haven't heard that about eggs and nuts, but I don't eat eggs anyway and rarely eat nuts so I'm doing good there I guess.

I can't wear steel, that's what my ears were originally pierced with. It was really bad and eventually I realized the steel was causing problems and replaced them with gold studs.

I should try titanium, that's not super expensive like platinum. I have noticed that my best earrings to wear are the silver earrings I bought online from a shop in London. I guess over there they aren't allowed to include any nickel at all.

I had my ears done professionally at a tattoo shop. I didn't get them done at a mall because of the risk of getting diseases there since they don't/can't clean their equipment. The tattoo shop autoclaves everything so that it was all sterile and safe.

I already have 24K gold in the holes right now to keep them open. The entire earring is 24K, I am not buying cheap costume jewelry. I know good jewelry and I paid a lot of money for my earrings. The earrings don't say sensitive ears on them because they don't come from a cheap costume jewelry shop, instead they are stamped 24K.

I will ask the doctor next time I go in to see if they can suggest anything else.

Hypo-allergenic earrings are the ones sold in cheap costume jewelry stores, they are no where near the price of real gold which is what I have been paying. But I do not trust those earrings. I am not putting anything that cost only $5 in my ears. My cousins also have very sensitive ears and thought those earrings would be good enough. They no longer have pierced ears.

Unless by hypo allergenic you meant platinum, in which case, I can't afford it.

Thanks! I will try your Neosporin method, that's one I haven't tried yet.:)

I have tried silver and it seems to work better than gold possibly. But it's kind of hard to tell because usually I only try silver once my ears are already healed. Eventually, they end up getting infected again somehow and the fun starts all over again.

I don't have a skin sensitivity to any metals on the rest of my body. I can wear the cheapest necklaces, rings, anything else.

The only metals I've tried on earrings are: surgical steel (first pierced only), 24K gold, 18K gold, some 14K, and once 10K gold with horrible results, and sterling silver. That's it.

I don't think the 24K earrings were helping much, but I put in some silver ones and it's hard to tell, but based on my ears leaking out tons more stuff, I think these may actually be worse. My ears are leaking out transparent yellow fluid now though, not pus. So maybe that's allergy, not infection?

I'm not sure, but that sounds exactly like what I used to have. Technically, if you think about it, a true infection would involve pus, swelling, and redness. So maybe it is just an allergy. I'm not surprised that 10k gold gave you worse results than other types of gold. 24k gold is pure gold. As you progress farther down to 10k gold, other metals are added into the gold to cut down on the actual amount of real gold. Nickel could be one of those metals included and perhaps you have an allergy to it. You could see an allergist to talk to them about it and find out what is making your ears so sensitive. Also, have you ever looked for hypoallergenic earrings? Apparently, they have no nickel included in the materials that the earrings are made of, so I'm thinking that a sensitivity to nickel must be a pretty common problem.

I buy nickel-free silver earrings on eBay from European countries that don't allow nickel. But for the gold, I don't know if it's nickel free.

I haven't tried the hypo-allergenic earrings because I'm too afraid that they'll make my ears worse (at this point though, it's hard to see anything getting worse).

The neosporin seemed to make it all worse, so I'm back to Betadine since if that works on animal bite punctures, it should work on ear punctures. I'm going to try to find some earrings in titanium. I've tried stainless steel when I first got my ears pierced and that didn't even work out too well, but they use titanium in surgeries so I'm hoping that will work.

Titanium might be a good idea. I'm not surprised that neosporin didn't help. Have you tried hydrogen peroxide?

I have tried hydrogen peroxide. It works very well to clean up the mess of all the junk coming out of my ears. But since it destroys tissue too, it never seems to heal.

I got some surgical steel earrings yesterday to try those since the silver isn't helping enough. This is supposed to be the type of steel used for body implants. They weren't actually earrings, so they're 16 gauge. Which is what I had my ears pierced with initially, but I didn't think they'd fit anymore. But they are so nasty and infected anything would fit apparently because these slipped right in. So I'll try to leave them in and clean around them for awhile to see if that helps. At least even if I'm still allergic to these, they only touch right on the pierced hole. The silver ones I was using had a ball on the front that made the skin slough off right there.