A 33-year-old man in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, fell asleep wearing headphones and developed an ear that kept swelling for a week. Doctors diagnosed an auricular hematoma, a pocket of blood under the skin of the outer ear, and had to drain it three times. The authors of the June case report in the Journal of Surgical Case Reports, which MedicalDaily covered earlier this month, wrote that "to our knowledge, this is the first case to link headphone use to an auricular hematoma directly."
That case is one piece of a small but growing medical record. Pressure, heat, moisture, and even the plastics in ear tips have been linked in published studies and case reports to several distinct ear problems, from the cartilage of the outer ear to the skin deep inside the canal.
