I believe in natural medicine; I always start with an alternative approach to any illness. I'm very suspicious of anything medical. I've seen MDs ridicule ear candling but I thought they were just being negative about something that wasn't pharmaceutical. So I've used ear candles on myself and my family. I believed the hype about removing ear wax. I trusted the nice lady at my local health food store without looking into the validity of her claims or the safety of the product for myself.
When my brother (who disagrees with me on almost everything) questioned the physics behind the process, we did an experiment. We used a closed plastic tube to simulate an ear and burned a candle as if we were "candling" the plastic tube. The results were exactly the same as when a similar candle was burned in an ear. So ear candling is a complete sham. My brother was right.
The "ear wax" is simply the melted beeswax and soot which looks a great deal like ear wax. The "yeast dust" is just dried and crumbled beeswax. I would have thought that a responsible manufacturer would have tested the wax residue in the candle to confirm that it was in fact human earwax and not beeswax. Apparently this has never been done. Or perhaps tests were made but they chose to mislead the public.
This kind of predatory behavior is what gives the medical community a legitimate excuse to denigrate the natural products industry. There is no excuse for this kind of snake oil marketing.
Googling "ear candling" will produce multiple photographs of experiments where people compared candles burned in an ear with candles burned without human contact. The results are the same as in our experiment.
Drs. Shenk and Dancer produced an excellent report that includes photographs taken with an otoscope that shows accumulated dust from candling. Their before and after pictures confirm that not only was considerable dust added to the ear but no wax was removed in the process..
So don't waste your money on these worthless and dangerous products. If you have wax buildup, see your doctor or your pharmacist.
