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 I saw some earwax candles in the store the other day. The packaging promised me the world: that the release of impurities and removal of earwax would cause my skin to look 30 years younger. I am in my 20's but I wouldn't mind restoring that pre-natal glow to my cheeks.
Of course, this seemed too good to be true: Research time!
First of all, wax is bad right? Wrong. We were created to have wax in our ear, in order to protect it from drying out, and for many other reason. When we move our jaw, our natural mechanisms work that wax out on it's own, bringing with it any debris that may have made it's way inside.
Now, people do think wax tastes bad, and therefore, it must be removed with state of the art hollow candles.
Turns out not only are these products, ahem, a hoax, it is also rather dangerous to stick a lit candle in your ear. Apparently, the candles are supposed to create a vacuum and suck all that bad waxy stuff out. Research done by Quackwatch.com has found that the candles don't have any suction at all, and if they did suck hard enough to get that wax out, it would destroy our ear drum and possibly damage the brain.
Truth is, people using the candle method have gotten more earwax deposited in the ear (At high temperatures!) while getting no wax out. Bummer. Oh yeah and if you do decide to stick a lit candle in your ear this is the only link you'll need. |
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The packaging on the ear candles you saw was definitely inflating their purpose beyond reasonable claims, but that doesn't mean that the contents of the package have no benefits at all. After all, take dentists' offices - to look at the beaming, happy couples and successful athletes gracing their pamphlets and brochures, anyone would think that going to their offices would be the sure way to prove yourself as a good, upright, reasonable, upwardly-mobile person, and that with your new American Dental Association-approved blinding white grin, your "Rembrandt smile" counterpart of the opposite gender wouldn't be able to resist you. As someone who goes to the dentist faithfully every six months and does all their self-care routines in between as well, I can tell you it doesn't do that. It keeps your teeth clean and relatively healthy - that's all. But that's still a legitimate reason to go, despite the inflated claims suggested by subtle elements of their advertising.
Now, I definitely wouldn't let anyone do ear candling who hadn't been trained in it, but I can tell you from experience that it makes a big difference. Two years ago I had such terrible wax buildup I couldn't hear properly anymore. After my first ear candling session I could hear far better, and after the second a week later my hearing was totally back to normal. I now work in the same natural health office suite where that took place and I have seen dozens of people file through with similarly happy stories to tell after a session.
Sites that try to "debunk" ear candling are themselves biased. It wouldn't be much of a quack-watch article if they said, "oh, done properly, this is fine. Select a practitioner carefully and enjoy your improved hearing." And MDs who tell you not to do this sort of thing just say that either because it's what a teacher or colleague told them, or they've been reading the same website you did...or because they want to charge you to extract your ear wax themselves in a ridiculously painful and harsh procedure, even though they can't do as good a job as ear candling does. (They can only get what's in the ear canal itself; candling draws wax through the membranes that keep buildup trapped in other areas such as the mastoid process.)
Just because somebody out there cries "quack" doesn't mean it's so.
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