Current location:	home
Current mood:	amused
Current music:	Michael Buble - Dance With Me

Ancient rites should remain just that....ancient
Recently I was at a family gathering and a couple of my relatives asked me if I had ever heard of something called "ear candling or ear coning". I replied in the negative and they went on to explain it is used for people who have problems with ear wax and other debris in the ear. The procedure is as follows, you insert a special tightly rolled cone, preferably rolled by a left-handed person so that the "spiral" is right, into your ear. You then light the other end on fire and the vacuum created by fire is supposed to pull all kinds of softened and melted junk out of your inner ear that you could never reach with a Q-tip. One of them said, "You wouldn't believe the junk that you have in your ears and that comes out with this thing."

I stared at them in disbelief and then I asked, "You what? You light something on fire In Your Ear???" They assured me it's a well-known and ancient technique and that you could buy these ear cones or "ear candles" in the health food store. I sat there for a while trying to figure out how to match up my medical knowledge with this bit of new information because I couldn't understand how a person could have a boatload of gunk in their ears without having diminished hearing or even worse, an ear infection. Ears were designed to be automatically self-cleansing and for years and years we have been warned by our moms or warned our own kids to not stick anything in their ears or they could puncture their eardrums. When I mentioned this conversation to Jigsaw Pig, he helpfully pointed out the dangers in having fire that close to your head. (Actually he said something like, "Chessie, That Would Not Be A Good Idea!")

Today I remembered I wanted to look this up on Google and find out if it was a hoax or not and found out there are entire professionals who do nothing but candle ears for around $35-$75 an hour. I think they called themselves Auditory Conologists. They base their practice on the fact that ancient Chinese and Hindu people used this technique for centuries with amazing results. They say it will: "soothe, heal and calm" the ear, sinuses and "promotes spiritual and emotional health".

I read through various sites about ear candling, how they make the cones from unbleached muslim since ear canals don't like bleach and how they use natural beeswax to coat the cones with (since ear canals also don't like manufactured paraffin) and infuse the linen and wax with various herbs and other holistic remedies. They claimed it cured everything from impacted sinuses to chronic ear infections and one lady even professed that it "cleaned your brains out" to which I will refrain from commenting on.

I finally came upon a website where a medical doctor described the dangers of using this technique on your ears and I read with mounting horror about "burned ears, burned hair, melted wax having to be scraped off people's eardrums, infections, ruptured eardrums, etc. One poor lady tried to do this to herself, lost control of the cone, it fell onto the bed and caught the bed covers, the curtains and everything else in the room on fire, she had an asthma attack and died later at the hospital.

A few smart people went home after being told ear candling would cure all their woes and rigged up a test whereby they collected what melted from the cone separately from what came out of their ear. And what came out of their ear, you ask? Absolutely nothing. All the debris so proudly displayed by the candlee after their ear candling was nothing but melted beeswax and the chaff that was in the beeswax to begin with. As everyone knows, bees don't strain their wax. In another side-note, the vacuum that was supposed to be caused by the smoke and fire as it used up oxygen in the cone wasn't even strong enough to lift dust out of the ear canal, let alone sticky wax. In order to lift sticky wax out of an ear, the vacuum would have to be so strong, any attempt to use it would completely rupture the ear drum.

So if anyone ever mentions ear candling to you and it strikes a chord of curiosity just remember what your mother always told you about sticking sharp things in your ears and if she had thought about it, she would have included Fire in that sentence. But if you absolutely must try it, always remember to do it with a friend.