Bad Science Read Free

placed in the ear it forms a seal which enables wax and other impurities to be drawn out of the ear.” The proof comes when you open a candle up and discover that it is filled with a familiar waxy orange substance, which must surely be earwax. If you’d like to test this yourself, you will need: an ear, a clothespin, some poster putty, a dusty floor, some scissors, and two ear candles.
    If you light one ear candle, and hold it over some dust, you will find little evidence of any suction. Before you rush to publish your finding in a peer-reviewed academic journal, someone has beaten you to it: a paper published in the medical journal Laryngoscope used expensive tympanometry equipment and found—as you have—that ear candles exert no suction. There is no truth to the claim that doctors dismiss alternative therapies out of hand.
    But what if the wax and toxins are being drawn into the candle by some other, more esoteric route, as is often claimed?
    For this you will need to do something called a controlled experiment, comparing the results of two different situations, where one is the experimental condition, the other is the control condition, and the only difference is the thing you’re interested in testing. This is why you have two candles.
    Put one ear candle in someone’s ear, as per the manufacturer’s instructions, and leave it there until it burns down. 1 Put the other candle in the clothespin, and stand it upright using the Blu-Tack; this is the “control arm” in your experiment. The point of a control is simple: we need to minimize the differences between the two setups, so that the only real difference between them is the single factor you’re studying, which in this case must be: “Is it my ear that produces the orange goo?”
    Take your two candles back inside and cut them open. In the “ear” candle, you will find a waxy orange substance. In the “picnic table control,” you will find a waxy orange substance. There is only one internationally recognized method for identifying something as earwax: pick some up on the end of your finger, and touch it with your tongue. If your experiment had the same results as mine, both of them taste a lot like candle wax.
    Does the ear candle remove earwax from your ears? You can’t tell, but a published study followed patients during a full program of ear candling and found no reduction. For all that you might have learned something useful here about the experimental method, there is something more significant you should have picked up: it is expensive, tedious, and time-consuming to test every whim concocted out of thin air by therapists selling unlikely miracle cures. But it can be done, and it is done.
    Detox Patches and the Hassle Barrier
     
    Last in our brown sludge detox triptych comes the detox foot patch. These are available in most health food stores or from your local Avon lady (this is true). They look like teabags, with a foil backing that you stick onto your foot using an adhesive edging, before you get into bed. When you wake up the next morning, there is a strange-smelling, sticky brown sludge attached to the bottom of your foot and inside the teabag. This sludge—you may spot a pattern here—is said to be “toxins.” Except it’s not. By now you can probably come up with a quick experiment to show that. I’ll give you one option in a footnote. 2
    An experiment is one way of determining whether an observable effect—sludge—is related to a given process. But you can also pull things apart on a more theoretical level. If you examine the list of ingredients in these patches, you will see that they have been very carefully designed.
    The first thing on the list is “pyroligneous acid,” or wood vinegar. This is a brown powder that is highly hygroscopic, a word that simply means it attracts and absorbs water, like those little silica bags that come in electronic equipment packaging. If there is any moisture around, wood vinegar will absorb it