Photos : Man goes to doctor complaining of ear itch, doctor pulls out 3-inch insect from ear canal

Burying: As the doctor's tweezers move towards the insect, it appears to struggle to move further into the ear

 Patient complains of ‘a strange itch’… and horrifies doctors when they discover three-inch insect alive inside his head

From Dailymail:

This is the horrifying moment that a man has a live cricket pulled from his inner ear.

The man, who remains unidentified, arrived at the doctor's complaining that his ear was itchy - only to discover that a three-inch insect burying in his ear canal was the source of his discomfort.

A doctor then had to carefully remove the twitching creepy-crawly, using tiny tweezers to pinch the bug and pull it out of the ear. A video taken of the incredible procedure was posted online.

He said: 'These critters are known to be an invasive species, appearing all over the globe.

'They like warm countries and hide during the day. It is likely this cricket crawled into the man's ear while he was sleeping and was just hiding there until night came around.'

The footage starts with a camera that looks inside the patient's ear and shows the insect's legs twitching in the air.

The doctor then retrieves his narrow tweezers and uses them to gently pry the cricket from its new home.

He is careful not to simply dislodge the moving insect - fearing that it could bury further in.

Once it is firmly in the doctor's grasp, the cricket is lifted out into the darkened room and placed against the man's ear - to show just how big the creature is. The video ends with the cricket, still alive, crawling on a piece of paper.

Mr Sweet added that it was likely that the creature would have crawled out on its own. 

While the cricket is unlikely to have caused any serious harm to the man, it could have potentially damaged the inner ear - resulting in temporary balance and hearing issues.

It is not the first time that someone has been caught out by a wandering creepy-crawly. In August a father-of-three who felt a moth fly into his ear as he lay reading in bed had it buzzing around inside his head for three days.

Eventually Rob Fielding, 43, a marketing manager from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, sought medical help - and ended up needing a 90-minute operation to remove the insect from his ear canal.

And in January this year, Australian doctors came to the aid of a man who had a cockroach crawl into his ear.