I was once at a gathering, let's call it an "environmental jamboree." There were numerous vendors, and some of them were hawking "ear candles."
Now, some people are dim-witted wherever you go, but holding a candle to peer into their ears won't make their thoughts any less opaque. Well, that was the only sense I could make of the idea of an "ear candle."
I had never seen or heard of this before, so of course I was curious. As I watched some of my fellow gathering folk use them, I contemplated the results... and in my capacity as a nurse, I realized they were all being hood-winked!!
It does not take a lot of medical knowledge to debunk ear candling. I will walk you through it. Let's start with an anatomical diagram of the ear canal.
The wax supposedly comes out of your ear canal.
If you look at the diagram, you see there is only a short part of the outer ear canal that is then blocked off by the 'tympanic membrane,' or more colloquially, the 'ear drum.'
This delicate and sensitive membrane allows us to hear. Without it, you have difficulty hearing, along with other quite noticeable symptoms.
Here is a random picture from the internet showing the amount of wax retrieved from various people.
Your external ear canal is only about one inch long and as big around as YOUR PINKY.
There is NO WAY all the wax you find in the ear candle after you burn it could possibly fit in there, and if you did have that much, or even a fraction thereof, it would be oozing out of your ear canal and be quite visible, and that amount of wax would be no surprise to the ear owner!
It would be on every pillow case, all over your neck, and any place you put your ear, like your phone, and all over your earbuds!!
Ear candling practioners want you to believe that all this wax is initially invisible to the eye, and if you look into most people's ears before you candle, you can even see all the way in to the ear drum if you look right.
Let's look at our ear diagram again and see how small the space is.
So for all that wax to come out of your ear, you'd have to have a perforated ear drum. A perforated ear drum is no subtle thing; all the people running around getting quarts of ear wax out of their ears cannot possibly have perforated ear drums, knowingly or unknowingly.
The signs of a perforated ear drum include:
-ear pain
-Mucus-like, pus-filled or bloody drainage from the ear
-Hearing loss
-Ringing in the ear (tinnitus)
-Spinning sensation (vertigo)
-nausea or vomiting that can result from vertigo
So medically, all that ear wax coming from an ear is impossible. But of course, scientists that we are, we had to do an experiment to prove our point definitively.
You can easily perform this experiment at home, as well. You will need:
two ear candles
a willing dupe
an empty soda can
THE EXPERIMENT
We burned one of the candles in our willing dupe's ear, and the second ear candle, our "control," we held by the opening to the empty soda can, which like the ear, has a small opening connected to a large vacant space.
THE RESULTS
Here are the results, after the candles burned down and we opened them up.
As you can see, in the experiment we conducted, the "control" candle had the same amount of wax, which is bees' wax; and melted bees' wax looks just like ear wax.
To the people who say they feel they can hear so much better after the candling experience: Of course you can. For the last half hour, you had your ear blocked off, like when you have an ear plug in. When it is removed, voilà! SUDDENLY YOU CAN HEAR!!
We called our experiment and its debunking of the many ear candles for sale,
“The Great Ear Candle Scandal of 1996.”
I must say, it made us none too popular with some of the vendors. But we held our ground. After all, there was another good reason to use a soda can as a control. The similarity of the soda can to the human ear and head goes beyond the ear hole to the soda can and head themselves. Like most people who believe in ear candling, the soda can is as hollow and holds an identical amount of common sense.
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