Should ear candles be banned as dangerous products?

[LoZoccolo]

Poll question: Should ear candles be banned as dangerous products?

[Warpy]

1. They're dangerous and ineffective

but they're also pretty easy to make. Good luck with a ban.

[lamp_shade]

2. What the heck's an ear candle?

A candle made out of earwax?

[meow mix]

5. i dunno but if its a candle you stick in your ear and light on fire...

im voting to ban them

[-..__...]

23. Why, yes, it is...

and myth "BUSTED"...

http://clips.rofl.to/clip/mythbusters-earwax-candle

[leftstreet]

3. DU should sell them, use the profits for pizza parties n/t

[TrogL]

4. They've been banned in Canada

The claims they make defy the laws of physics.

[BuddhaGirl]

6. they should not be banned

It's important that candling should be done with another person.

I've seen it work for my niece who had a wax buildup and was causing her pain. After my SIL did ear candling, her pain was gone.

YMMV

[slackmaster]

9. A nurse turned me on to a very effective way to clear out ear wax.

Waterpik.



You have to use it on a low setting. It's not recommended by the manufacturer for that purpose, but it works very well.

[customerserviceguy]

19. Yep, they work quite well

I put very warm water in mine, and it does the job nicely.

[Hekate]

20. Try warm (not hot!) olive oil. It's mild, safe, traditional...

After softening with a few droppers of warm olive oil, excess wax can be assisted out with a warm water irrigation via syringe. This should be done very, very gently.

I'm glad your niece got relief from candling, but having just read about it -- it sounds like a less-safe option. If she's still having difficulty, perhaps a visit to the doc is in order.

Best wishes -- both my kids had repeated ear infections when they were little. My daughter outgrew it, but my son showed a 10% hearing loss before kindergarten, so he had to have tubes put in. End of ear infections forever. The doc said the gunk far down in his ear was the consistency of hardened glue, and it was so far down there was no hope of any kind of other procedure to resolve the issues.

Hekate

[slackmaster]

7. No, but they should be banned as quack medical devices

:nuke:

http://quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/candling.html

[Robb]

14. Heh.

...Since wax is sticky, the negative pressure needed to pull wax from the canal would have to be so powerful that it would rupture the eardrum in the process. However, candling produces no vacuum. Researchers who measured the pressure during candling of ear models found that no negative pressure was created. The same investigators candled eight ears and found that no ear wax was removed and candle wax was actually deposited in some of them...

[texastoast]

8. Peroxide on a weekly basis

works just fine.

[guardian]

10. Q-tips work better. n/t

[rucky]

13. Q-tips just compact the wax. See my comment below.

[laundry_queen]

22. Not necessarily.

It's how you use them. I had a doctor teach me how after he cleaned my ears out with something akin to a waterpik, when I was having recurring ear infections. My last check up my new doctor said she'd never seen such clean ears. lol.

[rucky]

11. No, but good ol' Hydrogen Peroxide works best.

Before I'm accused of quackery, I got the tip from a Doctor at UC Davis.

[backscatter712]

15. Hydrogen peroxide works! It loosens and dissolves the wax.

Also, get one of those ear-cleaning kits from Walgreens - with the bulb-syringe you use to squirt water in your ear.

Also, those kits have bottles of glycerin - also useful for softening up the wax.

If it's really, really bad, get thee to an ENT specialist - they know how to correctly remove the really hard lumps of wax without damaging your ear.

Better than sticking things in your ears that you light on fire...

[davidinalameda]

17. did he give you a "Q" tip?

:rofl:

[spanone]

12. not before they ban nose rockets

[onehandle]

16. I had an unusual amount of wax build up in an ear once.

Didn't even notice until one day I started hearing a clicking in the ear and suddenly had reduced hearing.

The doctor shot a solution of warm water and peroxide(?) into my ear a few times and what seemed like a pound of ick came out.

I was good as new and over twenty years later, it has never happened again.

Weird.

[pinboy3niner]

21. I never use ear candles with one handle

It's much safer to use the ones with two handles. :)

[Canuckistanian]

18. Please... stop the slaughter caused by these evil ear candles

What will it take to end this genocide of thousands every year - in the name of clean ears?

Won't someone think of the dirty-eared, wax-encrusted children who wish to live in an environment free of new-age charlatans and psychic-fair hucksters?

Oh, the humanity....

[FSogol]

24. LoZoccolo, did your Mom use ear candles on you? Does that explain all this?

:woohoo:

[pipi_k]

25. I get better light if I stick tiny LED bulbs in my ears...

and they last longer than the candles do

[Hekate]

27. For some people, that would make their eyes sparkle, too!

:evilgrin:

[applegrove]

26. Candles are dangerous.