If you follow this blog (and I know there are at least a couple of people who do), you’ll know that I had an incident last week involving a surplus of ear wax. Certainly embarrassing, but what can you do but post it on the Internet for everyone to know?
To resolve the problem, I went to my doctor. The procedure he performed was simple. He squirted Carbamide Peroxide drops in both ears and I lay down on the examination table for about 20 minutes to allow the chemicals to soften and loosen the wax. Then, while I held a cup under my ear, he used a waterpik to pulse water in and bring out the wax. Repeat for the other ear. When he was done, the evidence that the treatment had worked was right there. The cup held water and several liquidy chunks of yellow ear wax. Plus, my hearing was completely restored. My ear no longer had the blocked up feeling and I could hear in stereo. It was a comfortable procedure and took no more than a half an hour with completely satisfactory results.
If I believed in the efficacy of alternative medicine, however, I would have had a far different experience. The “alternative” way to clean your ears of excess wax is a treatment known as ear candling.
It works like this. You place the end of a special hollow wax candle IN YOUR EAR. The other end is lit and you lie there with this flaming wax candle IN YOUR EAR for 15-45 minutes.
No, I am not making this up.
The claim is that the fire creates a vacuum in the hollow shaft of the wax candle and this vacuum draws the ear wax out. The “proof” is a small amount of waxy, white residue in the shaft of the, and I cannot highlight this enough, *wax* candle.
This is a monstrously easy claim to test. We can easily determine the chemical composition of the ear wax and the candle wax and test the residue. In fact, these tests have been done and the residue is candle wax. It would also be very easy to confirm the presence of wax in the ear before the treatment and the lack of wax after treatment; my doctor said that he couldn’t see down my ear canal because of the wax blockage. Not surprisingly, there is no proof that the ear candling treatment does anything except make you look foolish.
Even if the flame created a vacuum, which it doesn’t, it wouldn’t be strong enough to actually suck anything out of your ear. I tried to clean out my ear with a squeezy bulb thingy that does actually produce a suction and it didn’t help at all. Do you imagine that generating even a stronger suction, by putting a vacuum cleaner nozzle to your ear, for example, would work? Is anyone foolish enough to test whether it’s even possible to suck wax out of the ear without causing permanent damage?
While some alternative medicine treatments rely on the placebo effect and are thus harder to debunk and correspondingly easier to believe, ear candling could be demonstrated conclusively to work, if it did. It doesn’t. That this practice persists in the face of an inexpensive, effective, widely available and safe treatment is a testament to human gullibility.
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