Was the cough caused by pulling out your ears?

Some people feel itchy in their throat when they pull out their ears, and even cause a cough. What’s going on here?

It turns out that there is still a “kinship” between the skin of the ear canal and the mucosa of the throat in terms of nerve distribution. The 10th pair of brain nerves in the human body (there are 2 pairs of brain nerves in total), that is, the vagus nerve, contains two kinds of nerve fibers, motor and sensory. Compared with other brain nerves, the vagus nerve has the longest journey and is widely distributed.

From the motor organ to the sensory organ, from the neck to the thoracic cavity, and even to the abdominal cavity, it is called the vagus nerve because it “walks far away from home” and “easily gets lost”. It not only branches the feeling from the laryngeal mucosa, but also branches out small branches to extend to the external auditory canal, especially the skin of the posterior wall of the external auditory canal has many of its small branches. The conduction lines of human nerves are more complex than the distribution of wires in any precise circuit.

When any branch of the nerve “main cable” is stimulated, it may affect other parts at the same time.

When some people pull out their ears, because they stimulate the small branches of the vagus nerve in the skin of the ear canal, the brain mistakenly believes that other branches of the vagus nerve are also stimulated. In this way, people feel as if there is something in the throat that is stimulating and itching, and then “false information” will be transmitted to the brain to cause coughing, so as to remove “foreign objects” or “sticky sputum” that may come in.

On the contrary, when there is something wrong with the throat mucosa, it will also affect the ears. This is the reason why some patients with throat pain (such as acute tonsillitis, acute laryngitis, tracheitis, etc.) cause itching or pain in the ears at the same time. In this case, the itch and pain in the ears will naturally disappear only after the throat problem is cured.