First: scientific method. Does just pressing on your cheekbones work? What about just pulling your ears?
No, anecdote is not data: doing it to yourself doesn’t prove anything. Get a hundred people to do it, and see what the results are. Get another hundred to not do it, see what the null result is. Get other people to press other random parts of their faces.
Get them to do the dance, but without telling them what you expect to happen: do they still spontaneously report decongestion?
OK, so presume we’ve actually gotten data which, when rigorously analyzed, shows there’s something there. Can we identify a mechanism? The frontal process under the cheek is not wafer thin. It’s not impossible that pressing there pulls the skin and creates a pull from one side inside where the eustachian tube is, and pulling on the ear creates a pull from the other side, and that’s enough to flex the channel and allow drainage, but it would be nice to have a CT scan of the process to be sure.
Also: Oh my everloving Cthulhu, what’s on that guy’s Youtube channel is the absolute worst kind of snakeoil and handwavy woo. “Effective Exercises for Plumped and Fuller Lips”?? Really? “Drink Water! Energize Your Cells”? Sure, buddy. “Positive Attitude”… sorry, that sound is all my woo alarms going off at once.
Sure, it’s a logical fallacy to accept or reject an argument solely on the identity of the person making the argument, but that’s when you’re accepting the argument on its own merits. This is making a statement of fact, which may or may not have some basis, but isn’t demonstrated or backed up beyond calling on an appeal to anecdote, and the anecdote is your own, based on being led to a conclusion. As Rebecca Watson said in her most recent video: “the human brain is a f*cked up pile of electric meat that simply cannot be trusted.”
Forget the argument from authority thing, think Bayes’ Theorem: the steaming pile of nonsense which is the rest of the channel from which this comes is a prima facie indication that you really, really want outstanding evidence for any particular piece of advice from it before following it, because it’s otherwise most likely that it, like the rest of the stream it came from is manipulative snake oil.
