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Last Updated: Apr 16, 2008 - 5:52:06 PM |
WEDNESDAY MARCH 5, 2008 (Foodconsumer.org) -- Aromatherapy makes you feel good, but does not seem to affect your physiology if you are healthy, according to a new study published in the March 2008 issue of Psychoneuroendocrinology, which essentially suggested that people should do not count on this treatment to heal any disease.
Aromatherapy is believed to help relieve stress and heal certain health conditions among other things. Researchers at Ohio State University who were sponsored by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health wanted to examine the effects of this treatment.
For the study, Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and colleagues exposed 56 HEALTHY volunteers to two of most popular aromatherapy scents, lavender and lemon. They placed cotton balls soaked with either lemon oil, lavender oil or distill water below the participants' noses for a period of time. In the meantime, blood pressure and heart rate were monitored. Blood samples collected during the experiments were also analyzed.
"We all know that the placebo effect can have a very strong impact on a person's health but beyond that, we wanted to see if these aromatic essential oils actually improved human health in some measurable way," Janice Kiecolt-Glaser said.
The researchers found lemon oil bettered participants' mood, but not lavender oil and that neither scent produced a positive impact on the biochemical markers for stress, pain control or wound healing.
Kiecolt-Glaser said quoted by AFP "The take home message is that good smells may make you feel better, but you should not count on them to change your physiology."
But a health observer affiliated with foodconsumer.org suggested that one should interpret the results with caution. One problem with the study he suggested is that the study used HEALTHY people. The common sense is that healthy people DO NOT need any treatment, aromatherapy or otherwise, and any drug would not change much of their physiology because their health is NORMAL. No drug including aromatherapy would make a person’s physiology better than normal.
One good thing the study found is that aromatherapy makes even healthy people feel good. The health observer said physicians prescribe placeboes often to help patients from time to time anyway, according to news media reports, why can't patients enjoy aromatherapy if they feel good when they receive it?
For more information on aromatherapy, read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aromatherapy
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