I’m pretty sure standard procedure in these cases is to introduce a spider to eat the lesser insects, then a bird to eat the spider, then a cat to eat the bird, etc… etc…
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Not that big. Insects are able to get into counterintuitively tight places.
There is at least one case where a wasp nested in a Pitot tube of an airplane, which has even smaller entrance size than the ear canal, and resulted in crash of the plane.
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Ears are annoying holes in the head. I hate it when bugs fly up in there, which happens quite a bit in that special time of year when black flies, mosquitos & deer flies are all in full force.
At least bugs warn you they are doing it. A few months ago I had to lift a tremendous potted Yucca & one of its damn leaves slid straight in & poked my eardrum. Such pain! So inglorious.
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I once was called upon to do exactly what is depicted in the video. The moth part, though, not the tick.
The patient was the father of a close personal friend, and a highly respected neurologist to boot.
I can report that he was an excellent patient, contrary to the usual notion that doctors make horrible patients, and was very tolerant of my tugging (almost certainly painfully) on his outer ear in order to get a view down his ear canal.
He instructed us (I was merely the tweezer wielder) to irrigate the ear canal with isopropyl alcohol to kill the offending invading insect before attempting extraction.
The ultimate path of grossness on YouTube starts with the search terms “Bot fly” or “cyst.”
Just sayin’
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Bizarre ER and the like are docudrama though, rather than video shot by a practitioner. The hapless victims would all have signed legal releases to allow broadcast by the BBC. I doubt moth-ear guy did, somehow.
And I know for a fact that I’d be looking down the barrel of a well-deserved de-registering if I uploaded a video like that one …
There’s a major advantage of not having a license to do medicine. Nothing to lose if you video and post interesting stuff without a mountain of paperwork.
Yep. So please people, keep on uploading the DIY — I enjoy it as much as the next guy. 
(With a bit of guilt thrown in, because a lot of that stuff is from places with poor access to healthcare and I’d be doing it for ‘free at point of access’ where I practice).
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You can always get your work (if “in the wild”) taped and uploaded by a third party, too. You cannot have full control over these things, after all.
A nice thing for such videos going viral could be a commented version where a doctor would describe what is done well and what is not so… Something like those bonus tracks on DVDs.
Something similar happened to me years ago. I was sleeping on the couch and woke up after a small fruit fly had found its way into my ear and was going bananas in there. I wouldn´t care to have that experience again.
The tick rode in on the back of the moth like Artreu on Falcor.
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But. Watched. It. Anyway.
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I think that tone can go a long way. Add a black-bar-o’-anonymity over the patient’s eyes, keep a measured, erudite tone, and you’ve got something fairly close to the nastier clinical case reports in the tropical medicine literature…
Shhh! I think he can hear us.
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But why was it flying in there in the first place?
Perhaps they didn’t dig deep enough to find a lovely lady moth…
Physicists solve longstanding puzzle of how moths find distant mates – ScienceDaily
It’s just too damn bad there isn’t a video version of scratch and sniff! Just think what that would ad to the presentation!
I feel ya. My girlfriend has a deeply patronizing smile especially reserved for when I hurt myself doing Feats Of Manly Strength (it is a totally different one to the Arguing With Inanimate Objects Patronizing Smile).
the bot fly videos are pretty gross. But at the same time, extremely satisfying to see it being removed.
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