Tinnitus and ear candling: lost in the quarrel?

I don't think I'm unusual in being generally in favour of science, but not really trained enough in it to fully understand the arguments that get thrown up in the clashes between scientists and complementary therapists. When this lack of understanding gets combined with the hope for relief that a condition like tinnitus inspires in its sufferers, it gets even harder to know what to think.

The news often likes to show an argument as being between one person who has found that, say, ear candles have truly helped his or her tinnitus, and a scientific voice referring to studies and papers that are not able to point to a measurable effect. Emotional creatures like me are more easily swayed by a human story, and tend to leave an article like this wanting to believe in the effect, and that science hasn't yet worked out how it can happen.

Ear candling, in fact, has many adherents, believing that applying the blend of beeswax and natural herbal oils with gentle heat to the ear will soften any hardened wax, encouraging it to leave the ear, and - for the more spiritual adherents - that it will encourage positive effects on a patient's chi.

It also has many opponents. Organisations in the UK that deal with hearing loss and tinnitus directly, such as the RNID, tend to frown on these candles, or positively warn against their use. In the USA, the candles cannot be imported due to an FDA ruling that they are a danger to health, and they are wholly banned in Canada.

Ear candle fans, however, often put this down to the organisations being blinded by their over-reliance on mainstream science, and that their human stories of approval demonstrate efficacy more than trials ever could.

As I say, that's what appeals to an emotional human understanding. And it's one of the methods of argument that the Guardian's Bad Science column often challenges, with a more human tone of voice than most scientists tend to manage. It's actually uplifting to visit the Bad Science forum, where you can see people who believe in the scientific method chatting like the rest of us, over issues like this.

But it's not just scientists who are ranged against the candles. Some people are simply put off by some dubious historical claims made in the candles' marketing - particularly about their supposed source in Hopi tradition. The Hopi tribal council has insisted that the practice is not, and never has been, part of Hopi medicine.

If the candles work, though, stories about their provenance are fairly unimportant. But there are also people using their individual stories of punctured eardrums and tinnitus caused by the candles to match the people who felt helped. Examples can be seen on the discussion page underlying Wikipedia's ear-candle entry.

If you're trying to make up your mind about these individual stories, you'd have to start adding up the stories to work out whether it's more likely that the candles would help or hurt someone's tinnitus. It's also worth remembering that a condition as frustrating as tinnitus can make you want a cure to work so much that you'll feel the benefit of something that has no physical effect, so you'd want to try to discount this appropriately.

Of course, this dispassionate and accumulative kind of knowledge already exists - it's the scientific method. And when it goes against what feels true, it's very hard to remember that a medical trial isn't just dry figures, it's the human stories of many individual tinnitus sufferers combined to be useful.

I'm lucky enough to be able to stay indecisive. But if I were to suffer from tinnitus, what would I do? I'd have to find a path between the scientists telling me it's a bad thing, the believers telling me that it could have wonderful effects, and those stories of people injuring themselves by using them.

The sad thing is that I fear - for all my hopes that I can be a rational type - what would really keep me from thinking the good stories make it sound worth trying is the fear from wax-related injuries. Fortunately, if fear is all that is holding my Enlightenment principles back, I read that I can get my courage increased with homeopathic essence of tomato.

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