Without access to acupuncture I turned to the ancient wellbeing technique of ear seeding

Practitioners say every point in your ear corresponds to another part of your body, so Christine Manby decided to give seeding a go

(Tom Ford)

Back when I was still small enough to be grabbed by the ear in passing, the elderly women of my acquaintance would refer to filthy lugholes as being “dirty enough to grow potatoes in”. So when I first saw the term “ear seeding”, I was immediately taken back to those traumatic childhood days when I lived in fear of a potato plant taking root in my brain. But thankfully ear seeding is not about cultivating a bee-friendly garden in your cerumen (that’s ear wax to us lay people). Also known as auriculotherapy, it’s an ancient wellness technique recently given an Insta-worthy makeover.

Ear seeding originated in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and it uses the same principles as acupuncture. It’s also believed to have been practised in Ancient Egypt. It works like this. You’re perhaps familiar with the concept that every point on the soles of our feet corresponds with a point somewhere else in the body so that, for example, pressing the big toe might give relief for issues related to the spleen and liver. Likewise, practitioners of TCM believe that our ears offer a handy map for the whole body with every curve and bump or the ear corresponding to a body part so that if you stimulate the ear, you can influence the kidneys, the heart, the lungs etc. The Ebers papyrus, an Egyptian medical text which dates from 1550BC, describes a similar system of energy channels.