Dowsing rods absolutely work, as long as the person using them has experience in finding underground water. The local geography varies depending on where the water accumulates in the ground, even if only very subtly. As does the plant life. The brain is a very complex thing, and it's extremely good at pattern recognition, but not necessarily at expressing those pattern in some kind of language. Your subconsciousness knows where to find water by looking around, but you don't. So you use dowsing rods, which can be easily made to point into whatever direction you want by the slight movement of your hands. Your subconsciousness then starts directing you towards the point with what it believes to be the most water.

Science fags will point to experiments where people who are proficient at using dowsing rods try to find a bucket of water behind doors or some shit, which entirely misses the point of dowsing rods. Are there any studies that disprove dowsing rods in practice? Is it even possible to do such a study?