Another way to do it is to get you to “pop” your ears on a more regular basis, about 20 times per day, often by closing your nostrils with your hand and blowing gently against that pressure. That’s a procedure done in the OR under sedation, but it’s an outpatient procedure without a lot of downtime. One way of doing that is Eustachian tube dilation, which has shown some promise with initial studies. If we can get your Eustachian tubes working, then that’s preferable to artificial PETs. That works, but with the tradeoff that your middle ear can now get water into it through those PETs and can (rarely) get infected. If you have ear tubes or PETs in, then these artificial tubes provide a more constant equalization of middle ear pressure. When they open, the pressure equalizes, and your ear drums move-exactly what you’re feeling. That feeling comes from when there’s a buildup of pressure in your middle ear, causing your Eustachian tubes to suddenly open. Don’t do that.ĮT tubes are the reason your ears “pop” on airplanes and in elevators. And you would probably be spearing your Eustachian tubes. If you were to take a chopstick and put it straight back into the nostril about 9cm or so, you would look a little like a walrus. They go from the front or anterior part of the middle ear space, to just below the base of the skull on either side, to the very back of the nasal cavity. The ETs are soft tubes made of soft tissue and muscle, suspended by attachments to muscle from the skull base.

If you think about it, there’s got to be some way for this to happen or that space would just be a little blind pouch filled with fluid-not great for receiving sound energy in an air environment. So Eustachian tubes (ET) are the normal way for the “middle ear,” or the space behind the eardrum where the little ear bones are, to ventilate. It’s not like I expect a patient to know what they are. I’ve gotten everything from a mysterious “channel that goes from the ears down into the chest” to a description (with hand motions) of what sounded like two plungers on either side of the brain pulling back and forth on each other. This topic is a bit related to the ear tubes topic, and I think it’s worth covering because I get all kinds of weird depictions of how Eustachian tubes work from patients.

Blocked eustachian tube finger sweep