I thought this was quite the story.
Obviously in a scenario like this, your not looking at fecal transplants.
I can most definitely say I had one ear that started to go bad first. I also feel my earwax has changed post Accutane. I think I produce much less than I used to.
Thirty years ago, Andrew Goldberg encountered the Earwax Man.
As a young intern in Pittsburgh training to be an ear, nose and throat physician, Dr. Goldberg met a middle-aged patient who had recurring infections in one ear.
Dr. Goldberg and his colleagues would give him antibiotic drops, and the problem would go away. But then it would come back – until one day, when the man walked in and claimed the infection had disappeared.
“We just assumed that one of our myriad drop regimens had finally hit its mark and wiped out the guy’s bacteria,” said Dr. Goldberg, who now oversees sinus surgery at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center.
The man knew otherwise. “You see,” he told the doctors, “I figured, I have one ear that’s bad and one ear that’s good, and whatever’s in my good ear I want to get over to my bad ear, so I just took some wax from my good ear and put it in my bad ear and within a couple days, I was fine.”
Dr. Goldberg just laughed uncomfortably at the man’s explanation back then. But today, he believes the patient was right: By putting earwax from one ear into the other, he was also transferring the bacterial colonies from the healthy ear into the sick one, and that probably cured his persistent infections.
This strange story is now a legend in the fast-growing field known as the human microbiome – the study of the trillions of bacteria that live inside us and the critical role they play in our health and in many of our diseases.