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# My ears plug up on every plane landing and every mountain drive
- URL: https://www.thefrictionlog.com/02820/
- Published: 2026-10-27T22:12:20.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-27T22:12:20.000Z
- Description: Filed: not on record · Patched · ear-clearing tricks, like the nose-pinch blow
- Author: The Clerk
- Tags: Patched

*The baby across the aisle and I were both crying.* — Passenger with a cold, 2009

In 1704 an Italian anatomist named Valsalva wrote down a trick for ears: shut your mouth, pinch your nose and blow. He meant it for ailing ears. It's what people still do, and Mayo Clinic still lists it. The trouble is a narrow tube behind each eardrum. When the air pressure changes fast, the tube, in Mayo's words, often can't react fast enough. That happens on the climb after takeoff as well as the landing, and Mayo says a drive in the mountains or an elevator in a tall building can do it too. Swallowing, yawning and chewing gum help it open. None of it's guaranteed. More than 300 years on, the best anybody has is gum.

**For now**: keep swallowing, yawning or chewing gum while the pressure changes, and see a doctor if the blocked feeling lasts more than a few days.

### The full file

Valsalva spent about 16 years cutting up more than a thousand bodies to write that book. It stayed a standard text on the ear for over a century. Still, the tube that gives you all the trouble doesn't carry his name. It's the Eustachian tube, after Bartolomeo Eustachi, an Italian anatomist who died in 1574, well before Valsalva's book. Valsalva got the maneuver. Eustachi got the tube.

The baby across the aisle has it worse than you do on a plane. Mayo says the tubes in infants and toddlers are small, which makes ear trouble more likely. Colds and sinus infections raise the risk too, for anyone. Valsalva's blow works by raising the pressure in those tubes, and air then passes into the middle ear if they're open. If they aren't, nothing happens. Valsalva worked in Bologna and died in 1723\. Yours is the easy case.