The internet’s a wonderful thing, where you can wander down a path, take a left turn, and end up somewhere entirely unexpected. That’s what happened when Salty sent me a link to a research article that seemed to indicate that essential oils would be a worthwhile prep for preventing gum disease. Neat! I’d been curious if essential oils actually worked.
What are essential oils?
What are essential oils, did someone out there ask? They are concentrated collections of volatile, fragrant chemicals found in plant parts. One can collect them by various methods, with steam distillation and pressings being popular methods. Purists raise their noses at methods using solvents (such as crushing the plants up in isopropyl alcohol), but these approaches get out a different set of compounds than water-based approaches.
So what’s in them? You sure won’t know when you buy a bottle. It depends on the plant, on the season, on the mix of flower/leaf/root used, on the extraction method, etc. An organic chemist could sort it out with a lot of trouble, but her answer wouldn’t necessarily hold true for the next bottle from the same company. Companies do seem proud of their offerings though, with a quick search turning up $7 an ounce as being on the low end for products that seem, from such a quick look, to be reputable.
Essential oils are usually offered in 0.5 to 1.0 oz bottles; and around $7 seems a common price.
Why consider them as a prep?
The cost per ounce wouldn’t necessarily be a deal breaker. What prepper has all the storage space she’d like? Essential oils are very concentrated plant products, and those who use them mostly use them a drop at a time. If they work, that would be a lot of value in a little storage space.
Work for what? Why, all kinds of things! Essential oils are touted for so many things, with promoting calm and sleep, reducing pain, and inhibiting bacterial action (antiseptic activity) leading the list. Put them in a warmer to use for aromatherapy or maybe mix with some massage oil to rub into the skin and you’re golden, reports suggest.
Lavender oil for sleep is one of the most popular uses for essential oils. I know you probably wouldn’t use it on your dog, but let’s face it, he’s cute. Thanks Eugene0126jp *
In addition, many people are attracted to them as they seem more natural than “chemicals”. But folks, please note those quotes I used. Everything in a plant is chemicals, most assuredly including essential oils. Sure enough though, the chemicals from plants they make sure to get in the essential oils smell very nice, and very distinctive. What you do get from a natural product that you might not get from a lab formulation includes getting the biologically occurring complex mixture of chemicals, and the exact forms of the chemicals the plants use. What you’d get from a lab formulation is knowing exactly what’s in there.
Essential oils are a complex mixture of biochemicals. Since we don’t know what many of these things do individually, we need to test them by using the whole oil in comparison with a control group.**
Do they work?
I started down this path because of the promising research report from a reputable journal. Truth to tell, I was hoping to find evidence they do work. I have never forgotten that our most successful pharmaceuticals were discovered in and isolated from other species, and it was often folk remedies that pointed us to these drugs. I like the groove of using what nature’s provided; I use tea tree essential oil as an organic insecticide. I’m a science chick at heart though, so I looked for evidence.
It’s probably a good time to remind you that we here at BBBY have no financial or reputation stake in the success of any of the products we talk about. We have no sponsors, get no gifts. I’ve never gotten any of my income from pharma companies and that’s quite intentional; I don’t much like them. In short, we’ve got no dog in this hunt.
Sorry, folks. I was disappointed to find that, although there was a decent pile of research, when you looked at the protocols…. many of them stank.
Lack of adequate controls and other problems with the validity of the research designs abounded. I’ve seen too much evidence of the power of placebos to trust any research that doesn’t control for that effect.
So I hit up the review articles, which is a kind of study where some researchers look up every study on a topic they can find, winnow out the ones with bad designs (lack of good control groups especially), then use statistics beyond my pay grade to sum up the findings of all the remaining studies to look for strength of effects.
The nifty-sounding article that got me started? Essential oils compared to chlorhexidine with respect to plaque and parameters of gingival inflammation: a systematic review
Once you got beyond the title, all they had was that the lab-manufactured chemical chlorhexidine wasn’t way better than the essential oil mouthwashes by every measure, just some of them.
Then there were the ones on how dementia patients didn’t show significant improvement when essential oils were used: Aromatherapy for promotion of relaxation and sleep, relief of pain, and reduction of depressive symptoms in dementia and A systematic review of the clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of sensory, psychological and behavioural interventions for managing agitation in older adults with dementia.
And the one that found inconclusive evidence that sort of leaned toward essential oils improving sleep: A systematic review of the effect of inhaled essential oils on sleep.
Sorry Mom, no improvement over controls in labor outcomes during delivery: Aromatherapy for pain management in labor
Isopropyl alcohol beat saline in reducing post-op nausea; adding essential oils didn’t improve the situation. Isopropanol not as good as standard anti-emetic drugs.: Aromatherapy for treating postoperative nausea and vomiting
… I could go on, but you get the point. Even when the researchers, from their language, had clearly hoped to find essential oils significantly valuable…they didn’t.
There was no evidence that the essential oils were not effective, but also no real evidence that they were.
The best effects were as anti-microbial agents, but in this use they require so much of the essential oil to be useful that there are much cheaper ways for preppers to get as good or better results.
Then, after an hour or so of reading about various ‘volatiles’ being the active ingredients and knowing that group of chemicals has a rep for rapid degradation, I got curious about if the essential oils would remain potent without refrigeration. They didn’t, not even for a single year, as far as I could find, here’s an example of what I mean: Influence of storage time and temperature on the chemical composition of the essential oil of Hyptis pectinata L. Poit
In summary:
I won’t be stocking any of these essential oils . Many aren’t shelf stable at room temperature, and when the placebo effect is appropriately controlled for, didn’t do much of anything according to the research. Now, I am absolutely not against using a good placebo effect, and the pleasant and distinctive smelling essential oils are a great carrier for placebo effects; so if the people you’re prepping for (including you) really think they’ll help, it’s worth keeping as much as would stay good until used up.
*By Eugene0126jp (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
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Salty’s Note: I’m sure this article has probably made a few people mad, but as somebody who has worked in journalism for 35 years, one of the main rules in the field is that if you are not making people mad from time to time, then you are not doing your job.
We are going to say some things you don’t like, all we ask is that you think about what we are saying and look for yourself. Don’t trust us, look this stuff up. If you need help with the terminology, feel free to ask, but the research on this stuff is very, very iffy (to say the least).
We are not saying “Don’t use this stuff” we are not saying “it’s bad”, we are just saying we can’t find much scientifically that says it DOES work. If you are a fan of the product, then by all means do your own thing!