Homeopathic ear drops

September 18th, 2006 - 11:53 | 1 comment

I just heard about the existence of homeopathic ear drops. As somebody with experience in this area, I have two problems with this. Homeopathic remedies are just water, which is often the cause of blocked ears in the first place when it disturbs the wax. Pouring in more water seems unlikely to help, unless you do it with an ear syringe, or apparently a super soaker. Secondly, homeopathic remedies are based on like-cures-like, and the only thing which causes the symptoms of excessive wax is…wax! So even if it weren’t just water, it’d just be pouring wax into the ear.

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One Response to “Homeopathic ear drops”

1 Johninnit Sep 18th, 2006 at 12:32 pm

Get away!
Surely ‘trad’ treatments just work directly on the wax itself (softening it and breaking it down) rather than trying to enter the body and convince it to stop producing the stuff. As homeopathic remedies have no active chemicals, any claimed effect must lie in entering and changing the body, so it would be ineffectual by nature on altering the state of earwax.

(Or put another way, if it’s a placebo, it relies on the gullibility of the patient. You can con someone into feeling better, but I imagine it’s very hard to con an inanimate substance to melt).

Or maybe it just comes with a very big pipette, and the instruction “repeatedly squirt large quantities as hard as possible into the ear, until all wax is (homepathically) dislodged”

Anyway, that’s enough of an icky discussion for lunchtime, methinks…

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