http://www.dbskeptic.com/2007/09/22/essential-oils-and-aromatherapy-a-rebuttal-to-bunk-science-and-the-healing-power-of-odors/ Skepticism. Critical thinking. Podcast. Community. Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:29:05 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2007/09/22/essential-oils-and-aromatherapy-a-rebuttal-to-bunk-science-and-the-healing-power-of-odors/comment-page-1/#comment-425 Janet Deans Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:34:42 +0000 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2007/09/22/essential-oils-and-aromatherapy-a-rebuttal-to-bunk-science-and-the-healing-power-of-odors/#comment-425 Hi I have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and was looking into healing essential oils when I came across your article. Thanks for your input. I am looking desperately for relief from constant pain in my body--maybe essential oils is just a myth after all, but I have spent so much money on pharmaceuticals and medical doctors that I am beginning to believe they are myths too. Hi
I have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and was looking into healing essential oils when I came across your article. Thanks for your input. I am looking desperately for relief from constant pain in my body–maybe essential oils is just a myth after all, but I have spent so much money on pharmaceuticals and medical doctors that I am beginning to believe they are myths too.

]]> http://www.dbskeptic.com/2007/09/22/essential-oils-and-aromatherapy-a-rebuttal-to-bunk-science-and-the-healing-power-of-odors/comment-page-1/#comment-3 Earwicker23 Sun, 18 Nov 2007 07:32:38 +0000 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2007/09/22/essential-oils-and-aromatherapy-a-rebuttal-to-bunk-science-and-the-healing-power-of-odors/#comment-3 Thanks for this excellent deconstruction and debunking of a Young Living propaganda sheet. As you point out, most persons legitimately involved in Aromatherapy consider Young Living and its MLM distributors to be very poor representatives of the field. At one point in my life, I spent considerable time helping accumulate and publish in zip files several hundred pages of information about Young Living and Gary Young. It was posted on the Internet and made available for download; the files may still be up there for all I know. But many of us long ago concluded that it wasn't worth the energy and effort to bother with the triviality of Young Living and its followers. They are there, they exist, and apparently have lots of followers. But they don't have a lot of influence in the overall field of aromatherapy. To the point of the question "How does aromatherapy work?" I have on my bookshelf, amongst a few hundred other reference books on the subject, a a 573 pp. book entitled "How Aromatherapy Works:Synthetic and Efficacious Pathways of Essential Oils in the Human Physiology" by Michael Alexander. This just happens to be Volume I: "Principal Mechanisms in Olfaction". As far as I know the rest of the volumes haven't yet been written. But it is very clear that however aromatherapy works, it isn't the way described in the paragraphs you so ably deconstructed. Thanks for this excellent deconstruction and debunking of a Young Living propaganda sheet. As you point out, most persons legitimately involved in Aromatherapy consider Young Living and its MLM distributors to be very poor representatives of the field. At one point in my life, I spent considerable time helping accumulate and publish in zip files several hundred pages of information about Young Living and Gary Young. It was posted on the Internet and made available for download; the files may still be up there for all I know. But many of us long ago concluded that it wasn’t worth the energy and effort to bother with the triviality of Young Living and its followers. They are there, they exist, and apparently have lots of followers. But they don’t have a lot of influence in the overall field of aromatherapy.
To the point of the question “How does aromatherapy work?” I have on my bookshelf, amongst a few hundred other reference books on the subject, a a 573 pp. book entitled “How Aromatherapy Works:Synthetic and Efficacious Pathways of Essential Oils in the Human Physiology” by Michael Alexander. This just happens to be Volume I: “Principal Mechanisms in Olfaction”. As far as I know the rest of the volumes haven’t yet been written. But it is very clear that however aromatherapy works, it isn’t the way described in the paragraphs you so ably deconstructed.

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