What would you tell somebody who is a clinician and wishing to use essential oils in their practice? Having been an aromatherapy educator for close to 30 years, it's really nice to see this journey where essential oils were once seen as a pretty smell. We knew that the smell was having effect. I'd like to share my own journey, how I got involved in aromatherapy. The way that I got involved in aromatherapy was, I had a passion for holistic healing, and I had a passion for traditional medicines. At that time, I was drawn towards acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, only because it was the only health modality that actually offered the most comprehensive training. That was a four-year, full-time qualification, and it was a diploma in acupuncture. But when I started to do acupuncture at that time, I was also doubling in essential oils. This is in the 1980s. There weren't even any aromatherapy schools. I think education for aromatherapy was only available in the UK, and most of that was purely massage-based. I do remember some of those early courses were literally only 60 hours long, and there was a very small anatomy and physiology component. Hey, but you've got to remember back in the early days, we didn't understand how smell worked, and guess what? We still don't understand how smell works today in 2018, because there are still these arguments going on about is aromatherapy, is essential oils, especially the way they work by the olfactory path. Is it vibrational or is it molecular? The challenge is that molecular means that it is based, this is how the entire pharmacological industry has been created around developing molecules that can mimic nature. Now, this chap, Luca Turin, who I've often referred to, suggests, "Hey, okay, these molecules, I've got a bunch of molecules that have a totally different shape, yet they have the same smell." When he had them tested, he realized that they had a similar vibration. So he suggests that it is the molecular vibration which the olfactory neurons are able to detect. More than likely, it's quite a complex mechanism, and I think we're starting to understand that that shape is important, that vibration is important. But it is going to change the way that we think about essential oils. Now there's no doubt, I'm not saying that essential oils don't have a pharmacological basis, because we know they have so many properties which have been clinically verified, the antioxidant properties, the antimicrobial properties. So I always try to find this balance. See, I get distracted over time. I was talking about my journey into the world of complementary therapies, and it was through TCM. So when I started my practice, I had these few essential oils, and my clients would come along and they'd see on my desk, "What's this?" I'd show them an essential oil. They were often quite stressed, so they had lots of aches and pains, and I was very keen to practice my acupuncture skills that I had been developing over all these years. However, they just said, "Wow, this is beautiful. Well, I feel different just by smelling the oils." That led me to think, "Hey, I'm going to learn about these oils," and that led me on my journey to aromatherapy, which took me all the way to the UK. I was very excited to be one of the early people involved in aromatherapy in Australia. This is like a [inaudible] ID, so it makes me so excited to see how aromatherapy is now growing, and we are seeing it being used within, we see doctors using it, we see nurses implementing it within their practices. So it's gaining much wider acceptance within the medical community, and I think it's so nice to see this more integrated approach to healthcare. I hope that aromatherapy continues to play a big role in integrative medicine. Of course, I started teaching aromatherapy from quite a young age. I originally wrote "The Complete Guide to Aromatherapy" as a textbook. I still consider it a textbook, and it's an honor that so many people around the world use it as a textbook. It is translated into Korean, into Japanese, and currently being translated into Chinese. So it's very interesting and exciting to see aromatherapy being embraced all around the world. But this is now the third edition, and this is now only Volume One. So this contains all the essential oil monographs, and I've written them in very much the same format that a herbal monograph would be written. So I do hope you can get your hands on one of these because it really will take you on a very interesting journey into understanding essential oils.
