Aromatherapy Shows No Benefits to Health

According to a new study, aromatherapy oils can help you feel and smell great, but they can’t have a positive impact on your health.

A research programme was recently conducted at Ohio State University to test whether essential oils offered a measurable benefit to our health. Researchers at the university decided to put a couple of the most popular aromatherapy oils to the test during the study, which was published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.

Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, who is co-author of the research, as well as psychiatry and psychology professor at Ohio State University, said that the study intended to find out whether lavender and lemon essential oils offered a notable benefit to health. She explains: “We wanted to see if these aromatic essential oils actually improved human health in some measurable way.”

The Ohio-based team of researchers conducted a series of different experiments involving the oils, but could find no measurable benefits. The experiments they undertook required the researchers to put a number of balls of cotton wool under the noses of 56 volunteers, some of these cotton wool balls were infused with the essential oils, while others were infused with distilled water. To ensure each volunteer had a regular sense of smell, they were tested prior to the test.

To test whether or not the scents of these essential oils could help the volunteers to manage their pain response, the researchers stuck the volunteer’s feet into cold water and tested their reactions. To discover whether the aromatherapy scents could enhance healing, a test was performed in which a piece of tape is applied and removed repeatedly to a spot of the volunteer’s skin. The test to discover the impact of aromatherapy oils on mood was conducted by allowing the volunteers to sniff the oils, before asking them to undergo nine standard psychological tests. Last of all, checking the volunteer’s blood, blood pressure and heart rate tested the impact of the smells on stress levels.

Source:

Associated Free Press
New York Times

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