In conversations about aromatherapy I often hear the objection that people don’t trust essential oils for curing their conditions more than they trust commercially prepared products sold in pharmacies and health stores. One conversation about the potency of essential oils with a long years loyal recipient of my massages inspired me to share why aromatherapy works and always will work. So here it is:
The very fact that aromatherapy has been here for far longer than commercially produced products should tell a lot of the story. If aromatherapy didn’t work, wouldn’t it go extinct over the millennia carrying all civilizations that used it into the modern world of (medical) science, knowledge, and information? If ancient civilizations in all parts of the world were curing their rich and poor with aromatics and there was as much, if not less, sickness in the world then as there is now, shouldn’t this very fact be testimony to the fact that aromatherapy works? If essential oils are extracts directly from plants rather than chemicals engineered by man, shouldn’t essential oils be better for health and our bodies and sufficiently potent to cure its ailments? If aromatherapy didn’t work, would Egyptian pharaohs take its products to their graves with them? And could its suppliers get away with charging small fortunes for it in today’s world?
Let’s look at this subject from another perspective: when you buy a commercially engineered tablet or capsule, the active ingredient, which is highly likely also an engineered chemical, is diluted by default, because you have to eat the tablet with the powder that shapes and holds the tablet together, plus possibly colourings, and you have to swallow the capsule with the material that encapsulates the active ingredient, also possibly with colourings. The powder that holds the tablet and the material that encapsulates the capsule will be digested in your stomach together with the active ingredient, hence the potency of the active ingredient will be diluted. Essential oils don’t have this problem, because a) you don’t have to digest them – they are absorbed straight into your blood stream through your skin, b) they come in glass bottles, thus don’t contain any other powders, colourings, nor encapsulating materials to hold them together. The glass bottles don’t form part of the active ingredients in essential oils. The glass bottles simply contain the oils. Thus the small fortunes that you pay for essential oils are justified by the fact that you’ll be getting the pure product [unless the oils are adulterated, but I’m not taking this option into account for the purpose of clarity of putting my point across in this article]. And do you know why some essential oils cost so much? Because the collection of the nature’s gifts from which they’re extracted can only be made at limited times of day or night, or is otherwise expensive due to labour costs.
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