As it’s “caloric vestibular stimulation”, ie. a temperature shock to the bits in the middle of the ear that sense movement and balance, I’d expect having your head upright at the time (not lying with your left ear up) to be important. Can anyone confirm?
Maybe it acts as a superstimulus to the “your off-balance, re-align yourself URGENTLY” reaction?
When this test is done to patients in a hospital, the patient is lying in bed on his back facing upward towards the ceiling. Ice cold water, 60 ml total, is introduced into one ear canal using a syringe. This is repeated in the other ear canal. The water runs out into a basin placed outside the ear to keep the bed dry. Severely brain damaged patients do not have any reaction to this test. This is a test used in examining patients undergoing brain death evaluation, so they are already on a ventilator.
Ouch—you lost me my motivation to follow this example at ‘syringe’. I guess I’m more of a rationalist than a scientist—my desire to know whether this works (on me, in an unprofessional home-test anyway) is rated a lot lower value than my desire to not have a syringe of ice-cold water injected into my ears.
As it’s “caloric vestibular stimulation”, ie. a temperature shock to the bits in the middle of the ear that sense movement and balance, I’d expect having your head upright at the time (not lying with your left ear up) to be important. Can anyone confirm?
Maybe it acts as a superstimulus to the “your off-balance, re-align yourself URGENTLY” reaction?
When this test is done to patients in a hospital, the patient is lying in bed on his back facing upward towards the ceiling. Ice cold water, 60 ml total, is introduced into one ear canal using a syringe. This is repeated in the other ear canal. The water runs out into a basin placed outside the ear to keep the bed dry. Severely brain damaged patients do not have any reaction to this test. This is a test used in examining patients undergoing brain death evaluation, so they are already on a ventilator.
Ouch—you lost me my motivation to follow this example at ‘syringe’. I guess I’m more of a rationalist than a scientist—my desire to know whether this works (on me, in an unprofessional home-test anyway) is rated a lot lower value than my desire to not have a syringe of ice-cold water injected into my ears.
“Syringe”, not “needle”. It’s just the plastic bit being used to squirt water into your ear, rather than a needle being used to pierce the eardrum.
Why, when I was a kid my mum, a doctor, used to give me and my brother (unused) syringes as water guns and it was great fun.