Ear candling, also known as thermo auricular therapy, is an alternative medicine procedure which is supposed to remove earwax, as well as to improve the overall wellbeing of the patient. The procedure comprises lighting a hollow candle and place it with the other end, which is sharper, in the ear canal. As the ear candle burns, it supposedly produces a negative pressure, thus sucking earwax and residues from the ear canal into the cone of the candle. In order to protect the subject from getting burnt by hot wax or other candle debris, a protection disk made of thick paper or aluminum is placed around the bottom part of the candle. The candle itself is made of a cotton cloth soaked in wax or in paraffin, then hardened in the shape of a cone.

Is Ear Candling Just A New Age Fad?

The health benefits claims of ear candles are hilarious and too good to be true. Such benefits include purifying the mind, stabilizing emotions, releasing blocked energy, curing Meniere’s syndrome, reducing stress, opening and aligning the chackras and many others. It’s hard to resist such a treatment, which can clear your mind and your sinuses in the same time, therefore many people tried it, some of them claiming they’ve got satisfactory results. However, tests done by various researchers or simple users showed that candling has no effect whatsoever, neither upon the general wellbeing and on the mind abilities, nor on the wax buildup inside the ear canal. The residues inside a used ear candle were actually debris from the candle itself and not earwax. Other tests revealed that the negative pressure created by heating the air inside the cone was not enough to attract the wax from the ear canal, and that if it were, then the eardrum would have been ruptured in the process. Moreover, there are otolaryngologists that testified to have been seeing many patients with melted wax adherences to the eardrum, which needed surgery to get removed. There were also cases of patients who got wax from the candle dripping inside their ear, therefore putting them in danger to lose hearing in that ear. A survey published in 1996 in Laryngoscope showed no cerumen removal from the external ear canal. Another survey in which 122 otolaryngologists were interviewed, revealed 21 ear injuries caused by ear candles use, out of which one was a perforated eardrum. (Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8849790?dopt=Abstract)

The initial idea that using ear candles can have so man health benefits came from the wrong belief that the ear canal is connected to structures inside the head and to the brain itself. This is not correct, as any anatomy textbook can prove it, so these assumptions of holistic healing may a well be false. Despite all these facts that prove ear candling as ineffective, it’s still an industry of multi million dollars per year.

Although FDA prohibited imports of ear candles from several Canadian manufacturers, such products can still be found on the US market. There are countries in which ear candles are available in pharmacies, as over the counter medication, sometimes being even recommended by pharmacists themselves to patients that ask for a earwax accumulations removal remedy. Ear candling can have catastrophic side effects. There are cases in which people set their homes on fire because of dropping the candle on the carpet. The flame becomes quite large by the end of the procedure, so there’s an increased risk of getting severe burns on the face and on the scalp.

Initially, ear candles manufacturers claimed this treatment was a traditional Hopi healing practice. However, the Hopi tribe never had any connection to this procedure, therefore their spokespersons asked that this name not to be used anymore in marketing ear candles.