Picking your nose is a perfectly normal, natural thing to do—but there are limits to just how far you should be getting up in there. In a new YouTube video, Justin Cottle, Lab Director at the Institute of Human Anatomy, offers a primer on the nasal cavity, and explains exactly why we get nosebleeds.
“The nose is soft and flimsy, but still firm and rigid. That’s because it’s made of cartilage—specifically, hyaline cartilage,” says Cottle. The main reason for the nose being made of cartilage and not bone is that this enables it to deform under pressure, reducing the risk of injury given how much it protrudes from the face. He also explains that hyaline cartilage can be found all over the body, as it is good for reducing friction between joints. In the case of our noses, that friction reduction is useful considering the amount of air flow.
Cottle goes on to detail what is happening inside our nose when we get a nosebleed—also known as an epistaxis—and explains that there are two types: anterior, where the bleeding is occurring in the front portion of the nose (these account for around 90 percent of nosebleeds), and posterior, which is happening behind the nose, and which can lead to the swallowing of blood. And one easy way to get an anterior epistaxis? Picking your nose.
“It actually makes sense to pick your nose,” he says, “to pick out those dried pieces of mucus containing dirt and all kinds of other stuff… But you want to be careful, because if you pick too aggressively, if you scratch too much, you can rupture those blood vessels, and then it starts to bleed.”
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