(HealthDayNews) -- It may be a fashion statement, but is piercing your upper ear a safe thing to do?
According to the Mayo Clinic, it's a bad idea, primarily because an infection in the upper ear can quickly lead to cartilage damage and serious, permanent deformity of the ear.
While cartilage establishes the shape of your ear, it doesn't have its own blood supply. So if an infection does develop, antibiotics are often ineffective since there's no blood to transport the medication to the cartilage. This means that infected cartilage usually needs to be surgically removed.
