This one is just silly. There were a lot of links in here, which I temporarily deleted instead of taking the time to update.
Original Website Blurb from 2012
This week’s episode (which rhymes with "ode," at least, although it's not really poetic in any way) centers around a fairly common minor medical problem that plugs into evolution on at least 3 levels:
1) Design:
This is really cool. Your ear canal works like a conveyor belt. Skin cells migrate from the center of the eardrum outwards and along the ear canal, carrying debris with them. This is a special adaptation. Skin cells normally only migrate vertically, up from the dermis to the epidermis, where they get sloughed off. These also go out along the ear canal, kind of like the back-to-front conveyor belt model that elephants and sharks use for their teeth, as shown on Inside Nature’s Giants.
Now the instructions on the Q-Tip box to only go around the outside of the ear canal make so much more sense. And that is deeply satisfying, in a healthy way-- unlike some of the things you will see below if you click the links or search YouTube yourself for "earwax."
2) Technology:
In the episode I describe how the ear irrigation (or earrigation, as one YouTube pun monkey put it) worked in my particular case, which is more or less the same way the ancients did it, namely rinse the ear out with your favorite magical healing solution. Noone mentions beer, but I have to imagine that it was tried. Search YouTube, and you will see numerous videos of this procedure, some of them with technological mutations or innovations, like
The stick
The curette
The curette with a cone
The grab-nabber
The syringe
The constant-flow line
And the constant-flow line with a triple stream, angled away from the eardrum.
3) Competition Between Ideas:
There are a lot of medical procedure demos and advertisements on YouTube. Way more than I expected. Who chooses the soundtracks for these things, anyway? I mean, samba? Really? In an ear-cleaning video? What’s the justification? “I just like samba?” Or is it “I just hate samba!” Personally I think the porn-funk wa-wa bass would be more appropriate. There’s a certain guilty fascination that comes from watching these things, which I have to imagine other people are also feeling – because they took the time to make the videos. And also because hundreds of thousands of people are watching them, as a form of catharsis. Read the comments.
By the way, in absolute contrast to the samba video, Nick the audiologist from Oxford Hearing Center, who has a channel on YouTube where he narrates a whole series of these "Interesting Cases," reminds me of Bob Ross, the TV painter with the world's most soothing voice (parodied brilliantly on cable access in Rochester in "Spray Painting with Art DuBois"). "Sometimes known as 'Singapore Ear'..." He is either genuinely extremely calm, or ( I like to imagine) he's just barely holding back from complete screaming white-knuckle mania like a Lovecraft hero.
In my searching of these videos, I also ran across the Great Ear Candling Debate. There are multiple videos on YouTube about this treatment, which consists of sticking a hollow candle in the patient’s ear, and lighting it (on fire), with the idea that it will suck out the blockage. What I love about this (aside from the honest and wholehearted intensity of the name-calling, which is hilarious and will be up until the point that someone gets stabbed over it) is that both pro- and anti-candling advocates try to get past the level of simple rhetoric and begin doing experiments, which they record on video and post to YouTube. How awesome is that? These simple before and after studies consist of showing, in some cases, that there’s nothing in the hollow candle, or showing that, in other cases, there’s something in the hollow candle.
Now, why does this not settle the debate? Once you see one black swan, you know that black swans are possible. Game over, right? Ah, not so, young grasshopper, because facts have to be interpreted, and we humans really don’t like admitting when we’re wrong. Being wrong puts us at a disadvantage in negotiation for power and influence in the distribution of resources. So we deny evidence. “That’s not earwax; that’s melted beeswax from the candle!” or “You put that in there by hand, you fraud!” Or we just put the sound of a duck quacking in the soundtrack of the video. Which is no longer science. At that point it’s rhetoric again. It’s no wonder some of these videos have the comments disabled.
I’m not defending ear candling as a medical practice. Even if it does work, pretty clearly, water is safer as a cleaning agent than fire and vacuum. But it’s a fascinating case study of the successes and failures of the scientific method as regular people apply it to their lives.
Updates from 2021
2018, actually, when there was a flurry of news reports about using the layered earwax of whales as the tree rings of the ocean. Here’s an example by science writer Ed Yong.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/astonishing-history-locked-whale-earwax/576349/
VSI Episode 35