Hydrogen peroxide too harsh for ears

Dear Dr. Roach: In a recent column, you said that using peroxide in the ear is a bad home remedy. Would you please expand? My children grew up using peroxide to clean excessive wax from their ears, and they now use the same remedy on my grandchildren.

Most earwax does not need to be removed. It should be removed only when there are symptoms (such as poor hearing, ear pressure or pain), and when it is clear that the symptoms are coming from excess earwax. This requires a look in the ear.

Hydrogen peroxide is too harsh to put on skin. Doctors may use it to irrigate the ear canal while looking into the ear, but it is diluted. Over-thecounter earwax preparations may also be recommended once the diagnosis is clear.

Dr. Roach Writes: I received a lot of mail from readers about a column in which a reader described realistic hallucinations upon awakening. I was concerned about Lewy body disease, a form of dementia with prominent visual hallucinations. The most common condition readers were concerned about was Charles Bonnet syndrome, a type of visual hallucination found in people with vision loss. It’s not well known, so I was surprised that so many people wrote to me about it, particularly when the original letter didn’t say anything about vision loss.

The answer, as diagnosed by my reader’s neurologist, turned out to be hypnopompic hallucinations (hypnagogic hallucinations are a similar issue, but these occur upon falling asleep). M.O., a sleep technician, and P.W. from California wrote to me with the same diagnosis. These can occur in sleep apnea, which several people wrote about, and several said treatment stopped these hallucinations. They can also be associated with neurological disease, such as Parkinson’s disease, Guillain-Barre syndrome and narcolepsy.