The Diver’s Complete Guide To the Ear
Listen up – Those flaps on either side of your head do more than hold your sunglasses in place. Protect the delicate inner workings of your ears with practical advice from the experts.
- by John Francis
Illustrations by Trevor Johnston
From simple cases of swimmer’s ear to the serious and sometimes lasting damage of barotrauma, divers are vulnerable to ear problems because the delicate mechanisms that govern our hearing and balance just aren’t designed for the rapid pressure changes that result from diving.
Fortunately, ear injuries are preventable.
All Things Being Equal…
Your middle ears are dead air spaces, connected to the outer world only by the eustachian tubes running to the back of your throat. If you fail to increase the pressure in your middle ears to match the pressure in your outer and inner ears, the result is painful middle-ear barotrauma, the most common pressure-related ear injury.
The key to safe equalizing is opening the normally closed eustachian tubes. Each has a kind of one-way valve at its lower end called the “eustachian cushion,” which prevents contaminants in your nose from migrating up to your middle ears. Opening the tubes, to allow higher-pressure air from your throat to enter your middle ears, normally requires a conscious act.
Swallowing usually does it. In fact, you equalize your ears many times a day without realizing it, by swallowing. Oxygen is constantly absorbed by the tissues of your middle ear, lowering the air pressure in those spaces. When you swallow, your soft palate muscles pull your eustachian tubes open, allowing air to rush from your throat to your middle ears and equalize the pressure. That’s the faint “pop” or “click” you hear about every other swallow.
Scuba diving, however, subjects this equalization system to much greater and faster pressure changes than it’s designed to handle. You need to give it help.