Sinuses and Your Ears: Interconnected
What’s Inside Your Head?
The head has all sorts of things in it. Blood, phlegm, tissue, sinews, bone, brain matter, and more. Your sinuses can get air pockets in them, and your ears tend to have a little empty space around the drum itself. So the short answer to “what’s inside your head?” is, basically, a lot. Multiple medical disciplines are necessary to understand it all.
An otolaryngologist specializes in the Ears, Nose, and Throat. That’s why they’re commonly called “ENT” doctors. You’ll need a specialist in the brain for that which hides under the skull. Beyond ENTs, allergy specialists have a lot of knowledge about the head’s inner workings.
What’s interesting is how ears, noses, and throats are interconnected. Primarily, this connection has to do with your sinuses. Here we’ll briefly look at how your ears are connected to your nose, and even your throat. The key factor is sinus pockets.
How the Nose and Ears Are Connected
It’s easy to see how your eustachian tubes drain from your ears into your esophagus, which is the cylindrical component of the body inside the neck that ultimately sends food to the stomach. If you’ve ever had certain earaches or other illnesses, your ears might have drained into your esophagus, producing a nasty flavor in the back of your throat.
How does the nose connect to the ears, though? Well, it’s the sinuses. See, if you get a bad enough head cold, it will result in inflamed sinuses that put substantial pressure on your head. This pressure can get so bad, it may burst one of your ear drums, and you could get a small amount of blood draining out your ears, down your earlobe, and wherever it may fall.
What Could Cause a Perforated Eardrum?
A sinus infection could do this, and the resulting perforated eardrum may lead to several conditions. One, you’re going to be dizzy. Two, you might not hear things right—there are multiple membranes, sound passes through in the ears, and sound must traverse distance; so a perforated eardrum can make the world sound like some sort of electronic sound effect.
If you don’t properly take care of yourself with a perforated eardrum, you’re at risk of developing an ear infection. That’s when bacteria starts breeding in and around the biological “architecture” of the ear. If you’re wondering if a “sinus doctor near me” might help, yes. But not how you might expect.
Treatment for Head Conditions
There are antibiotics which may be administered externally through the ear itself. There are also oral antibiotics to be taken, and sometimes an ENT needs to actually get in that ear and poke around. They’ll usually use medical tools for examination, then tell you what your best course of action is.
Sinuses, ears, and throats are connected. ENTs understand this, and help you recover from complications that can develop in these areas of the head from common illnesses.