subject: Getting Over The Flaky Image Of Aromatherapy [print this page] Do a search for the term 'aromatherapy', and what do you find? In amongst several respectable and useful websites is a smattering of scathing reviews of aromatherapy's therapeutic value. It seems, once again, the baby has gone out with the bathwater (if you're too old to know what this means, look it up :-) Though to the uninitiated reader, these reviews from physicians trained specifically in Western conventional medicine seem authoritative, and may even sway a few folks to believe their 'dubious' claims about the 'dubiousness' of aromatherapy. But as natural medicines in general are gaining significantly in popular opinion, those in the know about the true value of essential oils are demanding a new assessment of these important medicines. Let's look into what the word aromatherapy really means, and how we can bridge the gap between the popular concept of aromatherapy and its true medical potential.
We can start by conceding that there is a soft-science side to a portion of aromatherapy's practices. Really pinning-down whether inhaling lavender makes a statistically-significant difference in people's emotional status seems pretty tricky anyway. How about we just leave this part up to the people that are into it? If lavender makes you feel good, whose to tell you differently? Aromatherapists are not out to convince the world inhaling plant scents will make you feel better -- they're just offering it as a possibility. Maybe it'll work for you and maybe it won't. Do try another aroma before you give up, but hey, maybe it won't work for you, no big deal. AT THE SAME TIME, there are A GREAT MANY VALID SCIENTIFIC STUDIES showing statistically significant results regarding the psycho-emotional effects of lavender (and other essential oils). Along with those are even more studies testing essential oils on a wide variety of serious illnesses. Here's a peek into the hard-science aspect of aromatherapy, and why the debunker's of this medicine should really have another look.
The image problem of aromatherapy has everything to do with the prevailing idea that the practice is all about 'smelling things', whereas the science really about 'things that smell'. Smelling things is very subjective, and may have little medical effect at all (though we'll see that it MAY as well). Aromatherapy is defined as the complete practice of the branch of natural medicine using the volatile liquids distilled from plants. Authors of the hard-science aromatherapy texts available today, professionally-trained aromatherapists (one with a PhD in Chemistry) note that the future of aroma medicine is with the treatment of serious infectious illnesses and cancer treatment. You don't even have to smell them for them to work! Other effects of essential oils also being successfully investigated include speeding wound healing, reducing inflammation, and acting as analgesics.
You can read these research abstracts yourself by Googling 'Pub Med', and searching for 'essential oil' and things like 'cancer' or 'staphylococcus' or 'axiolytic'. You'll find a few studies too that were inconclusive, like inhalation of a certain oil did not change the immune system stress marker researchers use. But there's also another showing that EVERY OTHER marker of stress WAS changed. It may be the study chose the right oil, or the study population was better treated with the selected oil in some studies and not in others (one showed a stress reduction in women from lavender essential oil, but not in men). You'll find a full page of results showing a statistically significant effect on stress from lavender and linalool. Try other combinations of pharmaceutical preparations and see if there are more significant results than that!
So aromatherapists will even cede that there's mix results. While the naysayers use this data to say "aromatherapy doesn't work", the reasonable statement seems to be: "everyone's different. Some people respond and some don't. It may be that they would respond to a different aromatic, or maybe not at all". From Robert T. Carol of skepdic.com: "...I have to conclude that aromatherapy is a mostly a pseudoscientific alternative medical therapy. It is a mixture of folklore, trial and error, anecdote, testimonial, New Age spiritualism and fantasy." Stephen Barrett, M.D. of Quackwatch doesn't really seem to make a point about essential oils, but to just sound disgruntled about the whole idea. Sure, there may be some unsubstantiated claims floating about, but let's play fair. How many deadly drugs have been pulled from the market after drug-manufacturer-paid rigorous scientific investigations claimed them to be "safe and effective"? One chart puts deaths attributed to "properly prescribed and used drugs" between those from alcohol and those from alcohol -- these just above "preventable medical" misshap, and all of these above traffic fatalities. How many died from using essential oils? Can you draw a circle? How about the letter that comes between 'n' and 'p'?
Really, the medical, therapeutic applications of essential oils (repeat: aroma-therapy!) are making huge advances in acceptance in the scientific community -- among the labs and scientists that do independent and educationally funded research. Important studies are released every month showing the strong efficacy of certain essential oils in treating serious bacterial infections. Try a Pub Med search on 'staphylococcus' and 'essential oil' or 'tea tree', or 'mrsa' and 'essential oil'. You'll find pages of results. The big test will be whether these result in protocols for medical use. The most important factor in this may be how much we all demand that natural 'alternatives' are available in the main-stream, as the profit-driven conventional medical system is just not designed to utilize very low cost natural treatments.
There's a huge body of data affirming the strong anti-tumorial effects of essential oils. Linalool has been shown to completely destroy certain liver cancers. Frankincense has other powerful anticancer action -- cellular toxicity that's specific to tumors! (One of the great challenges of chemotherapy is killing the cancer cells without killing the rest of the human). Lemongrass too has "promising anticancer activity". Search for yourself and you'll find more pages than you can get through any time soon.
While its easy to snub aromatherapy as New-Agey and soft, it's so much more helpful to really know the score. We're talking about medicines with huge curative potentials, and limited side effects. And they smell good -- how many medicines have THAT going for them? Now it the time to change the miss-perception of natural medicine in general, and the therapeutic use of essential oils in particular. Educate yourself on the valuable research being performed. Use the term 'aroma-medicine' instead. Clarify that aromatherapy is really the therapeutic use of medicinal plant extracts, and while some folks appreciate the smell, that's just the surface of the entire branch of this healing modality. A little noise from us can change the way the graciously uninformed think about the healing potential of these wonderful oils.
