On Aug 8, 2007, at 9:27 AM, Milton Kicklighter wrote:
Hi All,
I just thought I would add a little "old fashioned" remedies to the
ear
thing.
When I was quite young I used to have ear infections all the time. My
mother would take the juice of a hot onion.... strong onion....
warm it up
and put a couple of drops in my ear. I would have almost instant
relief.
I was wondering if anyone else out there had the same experience,
and for
some of you scientist types, I was wondering if you had any thought
as to
why this might have helped. Would it have been the enzymes in the
onion
juice or some such thing???
At the risk of taking this discussion even farther afield from the
horn world, I'll bite. I'm a professional research biologist.
Here are some hypotheses that could be tested:
1. Any warm liquid will provide relief.
2. Any warm oil will provide relief.
3. A warm liquid with the same physical properties of warm onion
juice (pH {acidity}, viscosity {"ability to flow}, mixture of oil +
water, osmolarity {salt concentration}, etc.) will provide relief.
4. There is some specific ingredient in onions (or garlic) that
provides relief.
Here's how you do the experiment. When you have an ear infection
(ideally in both ears so that you have a control), have a friend make
two preparations: one of, say warm saline (dissolve about 1/4 tsp
table salt in a half-cup of water, or for our metric friends, about 1
gm salt into 100 ml water), and another of warm onion juice. Without
them telling you which is which (this is important!), have them apply
a different solution to each ear. Which ear feels better? Then you
can ask them which solution went into each ear.
You can do the same with, say, garlic oil and some other control
solution, for example, some other type of oil.
The reason you shouldn't know which solution goes into each of your
ears is due to the placebo effect, which is that if you tell somebody
that a substance will have a specific effect, then for a very large
percentage of the population, that person will experience that effect.
If it turns out that it is all about onions or garlic, then you would
try dividing the solution into it its constituent components to
figure out the active ingredient.
It is all about doing the correct experiment!
Until somebody shows me the data from a proper, controlled
experiments, I view all claims for therapeutic value with great
skepticism, though of course I'm always willing to do the experiment.
Anyway, if anybody wants to continue this discussion, I suggest that
we do so off-list. (I'm happy to, and would be *really* intrigued
if some of you with chronic ear infections were to do some
experiments.)
OK, to bring this back to horn issues: as long as we are talking
about experimental design, I'm delighted to hear about the
experiments where the investigators actually *observed* the throats
of wind players in action. *Very* cool!
Carlisle
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