Things to Know About Essential Oils
There isn't much research on the efficacy of essential oils.
I don't mean to imply anything about their efficacy. Many people clearly love essential oils, and what is worthwhile, my friend, if not love? And they smell good. Whole businesses have been founded on the premise of good smells. There's simply not much clinical evidence about essential oils and their effects. What data does exist is largely subjective, or reliant on patient/user reporting. Patient reporting might be as good an indicator as any when it comes to mood enhancement, but less so when it comes to, say, combating ear infection. In other words, learning about essential oils (EO) is not like learning about aspirin. Everything is frustratingly vague. That said...
The premise for aromatherapy isn't as silly as (some people think) it sounds.
You have a brain. You have a nose, and some olfactory receptors connected to it. If you were to catch a whiff of the shoe-spray-and stale-cigarette-smoke melange from the bowling alley in which you spent your salad days, you may (briefly) experience a feeling of youthful exuberance. The brain's limbic system processes both memory and emotion, meaning that smells can create big feels. This doesn't seem entirely reliant on connotation and nostalgia, either. Some smells excite this physiological pathway almost universally. (As a rule, people like flowers and food, and tend to avoid raw sewage.) Is it possible that lavender, aside from smelling "nice," possesses a unique combination of terpenes, esters, oxides, phenols, alcohols, ketones, and aldehydes that has a calming effect on the mind? That seems entirely possible, but more research has to be done. What is firmly established, however, is that the placebo effect is powerful enough to conquer anxiety on its own. Moreover, the memory of feeling calm can itself generate more of the same. As far as aromatherapy is concerned, the risks are almost nonexistent. At worst, you're purchasing a nice scent, at best, soothing your core being. No such thing as "certification" exists in the world of essential oil manufacture. Terms like "therapeutic grade" are arbitrary.
No regulatory body issues any sort of approval or rating regarding "purity" for an essential oil manufacturer. Many brands claim to be certified or therapeutic grade, but these distinctions are entirely at the discretion of the brand's marketing team. Like supplements, essential oils do not require any sort of FDA or other oversight. As a result, manufacturers' claims lay in the gray area of implying benefits without explicitly promising them. This is common to the entire supplement world, and shouldn't be considered an indictment of any sort. A bottle of calcium cannot promise to prevent osteopenia, either.
Essential Oils and multilevel marketing are sometimes big buddies.
Sometimes. Part of the reason for the recent visibility of EO is the tireless marketing efforts of multilevel marketing companies like doTERRA and Young Living. ("Multilevel marketing," or MLM, is the euphemistic term for those things that are not pyramid schemes, legally speaking, but seem exactly like pyramid schemes when your friends you haven't seen since high school call you up for "coffee" so they can try and sell you premium cutlery, or essential oils.) There is a hot debate about whether to ingest essential oils, especially in the EO community.
It shouldn't be that confusing—do you drink 'em, or not?
In an amazingly in-depth series of articles on EO, Tauna Meyer asks Paul Dean—owner of Native American Nutritionals—this very thing. His answer: you can ingest them if you want, but there's no need, because smelling them is more potent.
I'll be frank—I find this answer lacking.
His main point, later in the interview, is that ingestion safety is largely a matter of adulteration. How common is "adulteration?" He says somewhere about around 95% of EO are adulterated. Did he discern this in his lab, or with a scrying glass? It turns out that... you can just tell, after accumulating enough experience. Hmmm.
There is no straight answer about the ingestion issue. But most doctors and aromatherapists agree: just don't ingest them unless you know what you're doing. This implies that it is possible to know what you're doing in regard to EO. Is it?
You can become an "expert" without expertise, and develop expertise without becoming an "expert."
The most common aromatherapy certification is issued by the National Association for Holistic Aromatherapy. This organization is large and generally respected, but it's important to understand just how little applied science is involved in the process of certification.
The Bottom Line
- Aromatherapy is great, but it's more art than science at this point.
- Becoming serious about aromatherapy means wading through a lot of conjecture.
- You should buy all your essential oils at Foods For Living. FFL offers many brands, expert staff, and food-grade oils from Lansing's own LorAnn Oils, if you're into ingestion.
