The term “aromatherapy” usually conjures up pleasant smelling day spa treatments, or often some seemingly frivolous aromatic application. While it’s been the case for some time that researchers have been investigating many medical uses of essential oils: anti-viral, anticancer etc, there are very few studies that look at the effects of inhaling essential oils. There’s a few showing lowered aggression and less stress in mice and rats, yet almost no research performed with human subjects. From the scientific research, it is clear that essential oils are real medicine, with real medical applications, but does their inhalation for the effect of the scent have valid scientific backing?
Fortunately, a very interesting study validating aromatherapy’s aroma-therapeutic action has recently been published. It gets directly to the heart of the matter: the brain. It is within the brain that a response first occurs from smelling an scent. Our smell sense is the only one of the five with the direct connection to the brain; all the others have their signal first travel through another physiological structure to get there. And the smell sense is wired right to our most primitive centers, the ones that control emotions and unconscious activity.
Italian researchers published a study shedding light on the neurological process that occurs when inhaling bergamot essential oil. By using brain wave data, behavioral response data and changes in messenger chemicals, they were able to deduce that the stress-reduction action is a result of blocking the strengthening of certain neural connections. This blocking prevents the sense of stress from building up over time.
For example, think about feeling a familiar stress over and over. Like a sound that you particularly dislike: a lawnmower running, a dog barking, something like that. Here it only once or twice, or for not an extended duration, that’s fine. But hearing it over and over, or continuously for hours, that’s different. It doesn’t get easier to take, in-fact that stress becomes unbearable. That’s because the neural-pathway has been made stronger and stronger, so the same stress seems more intense. Bergamot essential oil makes it so that strengthening of the pathway doesn’t occur, or is lessened anyway.
This may shed light on the mechanism for stress reduction in one of the very few other placebo-controlled published studies examining aromatherapy. Teenagers wore a necklaces for the duration of the study, some of which released the scent of bergamot (obviously a popular stress relieving oil)! Study participants receiving the bergamot aroma noted significantly lower stress levels — which may be a direct result from this blockage of strengthening response to stresses in their lives.
In the conclusion, the Italian researchers state that now the anti-stress mechanism of the oil’s aroma is understood, there is a rational basis for the practical use of bergamot in complementary medicine. Complementary medicine is really alternative medicine that’s been accepted as valid by the medical community.
This leads to much bigger implications for aromatherapy. Many oils are used aromatically for various purposes: stress reduction, relaxation, mental stimulation and the like. These oils are also more than likely eliciting measurable effects in the brain. For example, several essential oils have been shown to prevent the breakdown of acetylcholine in the laboratory, an effect that is likely happening within the body as well when these oils are inhaled.
With all the published research that’s available, and this new elucidation of the mechanism of the aromatic aspect of aromatherapy, natural medicine practitioners hope we’ll see more recommendations for “complementary” status. A great place to have a look at all the available data is pubmed.gov — just search for “essential oils” and start scrolling through the pages. You’ll see tons of papers regarding the antimicrobial actions of so many oils on so many microbes. There’s research that shows immune system function being boosted at the same time. Then there’s the very promising anti cancer research that’s just getting underway. As aromatherapy in all its forms can no longer reasonably be laughed at, it may not be long for essential oils to finally be used for the wonderful medicines they are.
Find our more about the magic of pure aromatherapy oils, and the true therapeutic potential of aromatic medicine at www.synergyessentialoils.com.
categories: aromatherapy,essential oils,stress,anxiety,disease,illness,alternative medicine,natural medicine,natural health,science