Ear Candling: Is It Safe & Does It Work?

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Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Ear candling has become a popular way to keep the ears free from earwax and pathogens

  • Today’s main feature examines the evidence for and against it—or rather, the evidence against it. We looked for both (as we always do) but there simply is no evidence for it working, and on the contrary, extant evidence demonstrates it doesn’t work, physically cannot work, and is dangerous.

• How’s your hydration looking? For most people, at any given time, it’s not great. But it doesn’t have to be that way!

  • Today's sponsor NativePath is offering a 365-day money-back guarantee on their range of electrolyte and amino acid drink mixes, which are great for your kidneys, bladder, and pelvic floor muscles.

• Today’s featured recipe is for gut-healthy fro-yo fiber bark, a perfect healthy and tasty snack to have at the ready.

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

A Word To The Wise

Watch and Learn

Allergy, Intolerance, Or Sensitivity?

It might also be none of the above! Dr. Tania Elliot explains:

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Mythbusting Friday

Does This Practice Really Hold A Candle To Evidence-Based Medicine?

In Tuesday’s newsletter, we asked you your opinion of ear candling, and got the above-depicted, below-described set of responses:

• Exactly 50% said “Under no circumstances should you put things in your ear and set fire to them”

• About 38% said “It is a safe, drug-free way to keep the ears free from earwax and pathogens”

• About 13% said “Done correctly, thermal-auricular therapy is harmless and potentially beneficial”

This means that if we add the two positive-to-candling answers together, it’s a perfect 50:50 split between “do it” and “don’t do it”.

(Yes, 38%+13%=51%, but that’s because we round to the nearest integer in these reports, and more precisely it was 37.5% and 12.5%)

So, with the vote split, what does the science say?

First, a quick bit of background: nobody seems keen to admit to having invented this. One of the major manufacturers of ear candles refers to them as “Hopi” candles, which the actual Hopi tribe has spent a long time asking them not to do, as it is not and never has been used by the Hopi people. Other proposed origins offered by advocates of ear candling include Traditional Chinese Medicine (not used), Ancient Egypt (no evidence of such whatsoever), and Atlantis:

Quackwatch | Why Ear Candling Is Not A Good Idea

It is a safe, drug-free way to keep the ears free from earwax and pathogens: True or False?

False! In a lot of cases of alternative therapy claims, there’s an absence of evidence that doesn’t necessarily disprove the treatment. In this case, however, it’s not even an open matter; its claims have been actively disproven by experimentation:

• It doesn’t remove earwax; on the contrary, experimentation “showed no removal of cerumen from the external auditory canal. Candle wax was actually deposited in some“

• It doesn’t remove pathogens, and the proposed mechanism of action for removing pathogens, that of the “chimney effect”: the idea that the burning candle creates a vacuum that draws wax out of the ear along with debris and bacteria, simply does not work; on the contrary, “Tympanometric measurements in an ear canal model demonstrated that ear candles do not produce negative pressure”.

• It isn’t safe; on the contrary, “Ear candles have no benefit in the management of cerumen and may result in serious injury”

In a medium-sized survey (n=122), the following injuries were reported:

• 13 x burns

• 7 x occlusion of the ear canal

• 6 x temporary hearing loss

• 3 x otitis externa (this also called “swimmer’s ear”, and is an inflammation of the ear, accompanied by pain and swelling)

• 1 x tympanic membrane perforation

Indeed, authors of one paper concluded:

Source: Canadian Family Physician | Ear Candling

Under no circumstances should you put things in your ear and set fire to them: True or False?

True! It’s generally considered good advice to not put objects in general in your ears.

Inserting flaming objects is a definite no-no. Please leave that for the Cirque du Soleil.

You may be thinking, “but I have done this and suffered no ill effects”, which seems reasonable, but is an example of survivorship bias in action—it doesn’t make the thing in question any safer, it just means you were one of the one of the ones who got away unscathed.

If you’re wondering what to do instead… Ear oils can help with the removal of earwax (if you don’t want to go get it sucked out at a clinic—the industry standard is to use a suction device, which actually does what ear candles claim to do). For information on safely getting rid of earwax, see our previous article:

Ear Today, Gone Tomorrow

Take care!

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This Or That?

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Now for today’s choice:

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Recipes Worth Sharing

Fro-Yo Fiber Bark

Frozen yogurt, if not also loaded with added sugar, is a very healthy snack. In this case, we’ve got that plus an array of nutrient-dense ingredients for taste and texture as well as health-giving goodness:

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One-Minute Book Review

Cardiac Failure Explained: Understanding the Symptoms, Signs, Medical Tests, and Management of a Failing Heart – by Dr. Warrick Bishop

The cover of this book makes it look like it’ll be a flashy semi-celebrity doctor keen to sell his personalized protocol, along with eleventy-three other books, but actually, what’s inside this one is very different:

We (hopefully) all know the basics of heart health, but this book takes it a lot further. Starting with the basics, then the things that it’s easy to feel like you should know but actually most people don’t, then into much more depth.

The format is much more like a university textbook than most pop-science books, and everything about the way it’s written is geared for maximum learning. The one thing it does keep in common with pop-science books as a genre is heavy use of anecdotes to illustrate points—but he’s just as likely to use tables, diagrams, callout boxes, emboldening of key points, recap sections, and so forth. And for the most part, this book is very information-dense.

Dr. Bishop also doesn’t just stick to what’s average, and talks a lot about aberrations from the norm, what they mean and what they do and yes, what to do about them.

On the one hand, it’s more information dense than the average reader can reasonably expect to need… On the other hand, isn’t it great to finish reading a book feeling like you just did a semester at medical school? No longer will you be baffled by what is going on in your (or perhaps a loved one’s) cardiac health.

Bottom line: if you’d like to know cardiac health inside out, this book is an excellent place to start.

Click here to check out Cardiac Failure Explained, and get to the heart of things!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

May today see you well-prepared for the coming weekend,

The 10almonds Team