The Effect of Essential Oils on Physical and Emotional Well-Being I chose to look closely at Dr. Mercola’s article “Essential Oils Support Physical and Emotional Well-Being.” In this article, Dr. Mercola talks about the effect of essential oils and how they support physical and emotional well- being. Being that people smell things differently from one another, smells can have different meaning to different people. This article looks at Aromatherapy and how it allows us to capture the olfactory power of plants for healing. Aromatherapy was used hundreds of years ago, but never became common. The article also goes on to talk about how this Aromatherapy is working with our olfactory receptors and the limbic system itself to bring about emotions
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When referring to essential oils, I am referring to pure therapeutic grade essential oils from plants, not synthetic fragrances of perfumes. Fragrances have been around for thousands of years; Avicenna were the first to discover the use of alcohol distillation for the extracting and preserving of scent. According to Dr. Mercola, physicians such as Hippocrates, Galen, and Crito promoted the use of therapeutic scent. Even though being promoted by such physicians, the medical use of aromatherapy was discredited because of the large push for medical drugs. Now we are seeing a large increase in the use of aromatherapy as it heads toward the mainstream spotlight. In looking at the uses for aromatherapy there is so many that I am going to focus a brief moment on just a couple that have the biggest effect on most people today in our society with our go-go-go mentality. The areas that are covered in this article are stress, insomnia, anxiety, depressed mood, pain, nausea and vomiting, memory and attention, and low energy. The one I paid the closest attention to is the stress. I have person used melodies on myself for stress relief. The multitaskers of the essential oils in lavender and peppermint. I believe that almost everyone suffers from some level of stress. Stress is said to activate two body systems. One being the sympathetic nervous system and the other is the HPA axis (hypothalamus, pituitary …show more content…
Mercola’s article and Katal’s book. To start, both show reports that the human smell can actually smell more than we ever thought. The human nose can pick out up to one trillion olfactory stimuli. The differences between a human and a bloodhound is the two smells that small the exact same to us, may be two different smells to a bloodhound because of their increased number of stimuli than a humans. Through these many receptors the outside air is directly connected to our limbic system, which is thought to be the seat of emotion as put by Dr. Mercola. This was also consistent with Katal in the reading on page 219. Another part of the article that I found interesting that I had never heard of or was taught about was the differences between male and female olfactory ability. When looking at smelling test, on average, women consistently score higher than men. Both Dr. Mercola and Katal state this but what they show differences on is when women show the increased ability of smell over men. Dr. Mercola states that holds true even for newborns and throughout life, whereas Katal states, on page 220 of the text under “Individual Differences,” that women before puberty and after menopause do not show these gender differences. They both go on to talk about humans increased olfactory as a reason behind pheromones. Pheromones are said to explain our ability to “smell
When referring to essential oils, I am referring to pure therapeutic grade essential oils from plants, not synthetic fragrances of perfumes. Fragrances have been around for thousands of years; Avicenna were the first to discover the use of alcohol distillation for the extracting and preserving of scent. According to Dr. Mercola, physicians such as Hippocrates, Galen, and Crito promoted the use of therapeutic scent. Even though being promoted by such physicians, the medical use of aromatherapy was discredited because of the large push for medical drugs. Now we are seeing a large increase in the use of aromatherapy as it heads toward the mainstream spotlight. In looking at the uses for aromatherapy there is so many that I am going to focus a brief moment on just a couple that have the biggest effect on most people today in our society with our go-go-go mentality. The areas that are covered in this article are stress, insomnia, anxiety, depressed mood, pain, nausea and vomiting, memory and attention, and low energy. The one I paid the closest attention to is the stress. I have person used melodies on myself for stress relief. The multitaskers of the essential oils in lavender and peppermint. I believe that almost everyone suffers from some level of stress. Stress is said to activate two body systems. One being the sympathetic nervous system and the other is the HPA axis (hypothalamus, pituitary …show more content…
Mercola’s article and Katal’s book. To start, both show reports that the human smell can actually smell more than we ever thought. The human nose can pick out up to one trillion olfactory stimuli. The differences between a human and a bloodhound is the two smells that small the exact same to us, may be two different smells to a bloodhound because of their increased number of stimuli than a humans. Through these many receptors the outside air is directly connected to our limbic system, which is thought to be the seat of emotion as put by Dr. Mercola. This was also consistent with Katal in the reading on page 219. Another part of the article that I found interesting that I had never heard of or was taught about was the differences between male and female olfactory ability. When looking at smelling test, on average, women consistently score higher than men. Both Dr. Mercola and Katal state this but what they show differences on is when women show the increased ability of smell over men. Dr. Mercola states that holds true even for newborns and throughout life, whereas Katal states, on page 220 of the text under “Individual Differences,” that women before puberty and after menopause do not show these gender differences. They both go on to talk about humans increased olfactory as a reason behind pheromones. Pheromones are said to explain our ability to “smell