Can people whose ears feel uncomfortable when the train enters a cave go to Tibet?

It’s okay. When the train enters the hole, it suddenly compresses the air in the hole, causing the air pressure outside the tympanic membrane to suddenly be greater than the air pressure inside the tympanic membrane. The pressure difference causes the tympanic membrane to bulge into the body, which means that your tympanic membrane is very good and has no perforation (many people have slight perforations of the tympanic membrane, but not affect hearing). The inner ear and throat communicate with each other through the Eustachian tube. As long as you are breathing, the air pressure in the throat will instantly be consistent with that outside the body. After a few seconds, the air pressure in the tympanic membrane will also increase, and the shape of the tympanic membrane will be restored. If your Eustachian tube is too closed, you can make swallowing movements to promote the relaxation of the Eustachian tube, so that the high-pressure air from the throat can be filled into the eardrum as quickly as possible.

When you go to Tibet, the air pressure drops, not rises. If you take ground transportation, the rise in altitude is a gradual process, and the air pressure outside the body drops slowly, not suddenly, so the air pressure inside the body can drop slowly at the same time, always being the same as outside the body. If you are flying, the air pressure at high altitude is low. When you land on the plateau surface, the rapid increase in external air pressure is not as rapid as the increase when you land at a low altitude.

But the most important thing is that altitude sickness is not caused by the concave and convex tympanic membrane. The main reason is that the oxygen in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is thin and your red blood cells don’t carry enough oxygen. When the body feels that there is insufficient oxygen, it will automatically speed up the production of red blood cells in the bone marrow. After a few days, the number of red blood cells will increase enough to carry enough oxygen. If you slowly ascend the plateau from the ground, the number of red blood cells will already be increasing halfway, which saves time.

Of course, everyone’s adaptability is different, and we don’t know what your situation is, but it has nothing to do with whether your ears are comfortable or not. I went there by train without any medicine. In May, when I arrived in Lhasa at night, I walked into the city from the train station. Nothing happened, except that my hands were a little swollen when I walked, and they recovered before I even slept. The key is not to catch a cold in the first few days. I find that my condition decreases slightly when I feel cold.

But it was fine after a few days. One day before sunrise, I climbed up to the mountain in the freezing cold wind and had a foot-long nose with no adverse reactions...