Many years ago, as a trained herbalist and naturopath, I was
attracted to a small advertisement advocating Aromatherapy. For some reason, this little advert stuck in
my brain and began my long road as a devotee of the subject.
For some reason the idea that smell or aroma had therapeutic
qualities jumped out at me. A whole
series of little gears in my brain said “That sounds eminently sensible and
very obvious. Why don’t people use smell
more to make themselves better”. Perhaps
this came about because as a youngster I had become very sensitive of the power
that smell had over one’s feelings. I
had been in and out of hospital for a variety of reasons, mostly connected with
my propensity for adventure and resulting accidents and I had come to hate the
smell of ether. The smell of ether made
me feel sick. If near a hospital I would
cross the road. Even in later years I
would cross the road to avoid the smell of ether. I could smell a hospital a mile off and I do
not exaggerate. So the idea that aroma
had therapeutic qualities made absolute sense.
If “bad” smells had a physical effect so then the opposite must be true.
It seems to me that the 20th century in which I
was born had no place for smell apart from some kind of fashion statement
through the perfume industry. Following
the second world war, many countries voted for governments with left leaning
tendencies – Labour, Social Democratic etc. which had little time for free thought
or individuality, having a distinct tendency to bureaucracy and
technocracy. They built huge
institutions like the British National Heath Service, which, though having
merits, gradually became like the Civil Service – a career path, an employer
rather than a service. Across the world
old methods and smaller units were thrown out in favour of new technologies and
large complexes. Old agriculture did not
produce enough and new high input farming became normal. Chemistry and pharmacy in particular
benefited from this technological approach and today we reap the consequences
in health, well being and soil structure.
We are still afraid to admit to our own responsibilities in this
area. The chemical giants and the pharmaceutical
giants have us all by the throat. We are
at least partly responsible for ruining the earth by our greed with a social
conscience face.
Perhaps industries rooted in chemistry more than others have benefited from the ideas that Renee Descartes put forward. As a philosopher/scientist, he is attributed with changing the way that we think. It is his world view that is said to have become our world view. We have become rationalists and analysts. It seems strange to think that mediaeval humankind was not so interested in analysis. To us cause and effect are paramount. The enquiring mind cannot accept one or the other alone.
Such thinking has given rise to idea of the mass – mass
medication, mass education, treating all individuals as standard. This has given incredible benefits such as
the production line motor car and machine made clothing in regular sizes. Pause for a moment and consider how well a
size 10, 12, 14 or 16 actually fits or whether men’s legs really do go up in 2”
jumps from 29, 31 and 33.
Once we think outside the mass we have to consider the individual
and that brings us to holistic practice which requires the thoughtful
consideration of the patient, client, person as a unique entity like no other
seen before. Descartes was not too keen
on the senses. Allowing that we have
five of them, his view was that sight was our most valued sense, followed by
hearing. Touch and taste were quite low
class and smell was somewhere in the middle.
Viewing the body as a human mechanism he still had to accept that
certain bodies floated through the air giving us various odourous feelings of
the soul. Of course Descartes argued
that all the senses only exist in an intellectual way. In other words, nothing exists outside of the
mind, proposing that feeling and thinking are a single phenomenon. It is only
in very recent times, with a better understanding of physics rather than
chemistry, that we are sometimes better
off accepting effect rather than looking for cause.
At the beginning of the 19th century,
Jean-Jacques Virey, in his book The Natural History of Medicines, Foods and
Poisons said “Aromas are proper to the principal virtue of every
substance. There are even medicines
whose sole efficacy resides in their odour:
flowers, lime blossom, the majority of the mint family, aromatics, anti
scorbutics, musk in all which, loss of effectiveness accompanies loss of
odour.”
Such an idea pervaded my view of Aromatherapy. Of course, it is the antithesis of an
analytical review of the chemistry of essential oils. Today more and more emphasis is given to the
chemistry of an essential oil. This is
leading inexorably to the further industrialisation and standardisation of
essential oils. In truth, many
aromatherapy students these days have never actually smelt or handled anything
but an industrialised chemical soup purporting to be an authentic essential oil. A great number of their student days are
spent in learning the chemical effects of individual components of essential
oils and their safety. Increasingly we
are taught that essential oils contain irritants and allergens so should be
used with increasing judicious caution because they cause x, y and z. All this flies in the face of the fact that
Aromatherapy has an excellent safety record and that the majority of materials
have been in use one way or another for a good few centuries, if not
millennia.
Perhaps our scientific community, before reaching for their
keyboards and dashing off letters shouting “Voodoo and Witchcraft” should
consider the better understanding that we have we have had in the last few
years, due to Aromatherapy, of our sense of smell itself. The new biology, like the new physics, throws
up our better understanding of brain chemistry, demonstrating clearly that we
are not a machine and that we have molecules of emotion and feeling. Much of our existence is in the realms of
electro magnetism, vibration and information packets. With such ideas in mind, we can dismiss some
of our earliest and rather crude views that if an odour molecule hits our
olfactory bulb, it transmits a message to our limbic area, affects our memory
and that’s it. Or, if we are lucky, it
produces a hormonal response on the way (which we have possibly learned through
experience) and the real effect only begins when the molecule hits the blood
stream via the lungs or ingestion, through the skin and so on. That alone is where the real chemistry starts
and therefore effect. We can measure the
bloodstream but not the mind.
Whilst this analytical approach is indisputably valid in
itself, it is negating and missing the
point of aroma in therapy. People
respond to aroma in different ways and it is quite wrong to suggest that aroma
alone cannot influence disease. Even
following the French naturopathic approach particularly proposed by Pierre
Franchomme and others, the terrain itself can be influenced by smell. It is demonstrable that bacteria too can be
influenced by smell, just as the smallest of insects are influenced by smell. Whether this effect is the sense of smell in
the human sense or, is, more properly, stimulation by molecular vibration, is
another discussion but for this short article, let us just call it smell.
In my early training I was somewhat disappointed by the
emphasis that was placed on massage in Aromatherapy. This, of course, was before I learned the
real value of therapeutic touch. With
the rise of standards in Aromatherapy it is, however, a shame that methods of
massage have too been standardised and indeed have retreated from the original
19th and mid 20th century massages that accompanied
Aromatherapy. Today, massage is more
mechanical than expressive and because it has become routine there is little
resemblance to the nature of the essential oil being applied. To illustrate – the nature of Ylang Ylang is
completely different from the nature of Cypress so why should the nature of the
therapeutic touch (the massage) be the same in the application of both? Some essential oils evoke stroking, others evoke
friction.
This is not the way that Descartes thought, but it is the
way that Aromatherapy was practiced in its original form before it became
sanitised and adapted to the mass market, particularly by those who want to be
considered health professionals and to work in the system in a standardised
form. Not that there is anything wrong
in this, but in this process of acceptance one must allow for those
practitioners who have a wider or broader perspective and who wish to practice
in a traditional form. It is well proven
that they do no harm and those in the medical profession will recognise this as
the first tenet of medicine.
The sense of smell in our training is correctly associated
with that of memory. Smell evokes
memories. Smell produces learned
responses. Here I want to focus on what
memory is. There are two activities
connected with the word – that of storage and that of recollection. They are not the same things. This division has to do with what we may
loosely call consciousness. Memory
itself is not just a brain function. We
are led to believe that memory is found in the limbic area of the brain. Clearly the limbic area has to do with
imagination, dreams etc. but there is no specific area that we can identify as
“that is where the memory is” any more than we can identify the immune system
as being found in a particular place.
Such concepts are not new.
For example, we learn things off by heart. This is just another way of talking about
storage and recollection.
Physiologically speaking, as far as we know the heart does not store
memory but we often use the heart as a metaphor for feelings. Feelings
themselves are often recollections and feelings are what smells give us.
Avicenna, the great grandfather of modern day Aromatherapy
was writing as long ago as the 11th century about the powers of the
soul that translates sense, impressions into thought or memory from an external
expression. Note, please, then that a
smell, viewed as an impression, is entirely individualistic. It is what it creates to the individual that
has impact on thought rather than what it itself is. Smell therefore helps us to compose an image
from material we have stored. That image
may well be one of recollection but along the way, from such a process, we
develop an opinion and perhaps use a power of judgement. This is an instinctive reaction and is often
seen in animals. A rabbit seeing a fox
for the first time does not need its mother to analyse it and explain it in detail. It is extremely difficult to link analytical
thought or processes with instinct.
Instinct is something that is conscious but precedes pre-rational
activity. Isn’t that what Aromatherapy
does? Avicenna was certainly aware of
this approach and just because he was writing in the 11th century I
see no reason to disregard it because we are living in the 21st
century. Those of us who only look for a
learned response are in the majority. My
experience however and perhaps yours is
that people have quite irrational responses to aroma that mostly, but not
always, do good! I used to think of
memory like a filing cabinet whereby you simply open the file and get a
picture. Now through Aromatherapy I have
come to realise that memory is a reconstruction, a synthesis of images. This explains why different perceptions can
often be found of the same event.
Modern day thinking suggests that memory too has some
outreach facility. Indeed, memory could
be found in the field that surrounds us.
Before modern day computers, we didn’t even know that we had a field and
now that we know that we have one, I guess that whatever name we may call it
(depending upon our scientific or esoteric views) we can better understand why
there are such phenomena as mass hysteria or perhaps shared memories, perhaps
even on a national scale.
Odour molecules are incredible activators and I believe that
we should be promoting the sense of smell far more in the practice of
Aromatherapy. Let people smell things,
let them enjoy them and go back to some of the very crude but basic ideas in
Aromatherapy, e.g. a few drops of essential oil on a pad in a pillow, essential
oils in cars, in the office, using proper nebulising diffusers, essential oils
on a handkerchief for panic attacks, creative perfumery with a therapeutic
purpose. Because of the memory aspect
there is little point in trying to understand sometimes why a certain essential
oil has made a person feel better. A
patient of mine with persistent tonsillitis, after a couple of treatments,
spent about half an hour talking to me about some issue in their life and has
not had tonsillitis since. I was still
in touch with that patient ten years later, with no recurrence of the
problem. What provoked the recovery from
an identifiable illness was a response to an unidentified essential oil. It was Coco Chanel who said “The most
mysterious, the most human thing, is smell.”
We should remember that despite textbooks, we are still at
the stage where there are three theories about how we smell. The populist theory of stereochemistry is the
one that has the most credence and is most often taught as fact. My point is that we are still uncertain about
the mechanism but we can be certain about the effect. In the last 20 years we have seen a rise in
the understanding of molecules and the emotion of consciousness and how our
immune system works. In this past
century, we have seen anatomy change its views on the vestigial tonsils that
were not needed or the vestigial appendix that was not needed into a better
understanding of how these two organs are connected to our immune systems. Jacobsen’s Organ as part of our smell system,
too, has been dismissed as vestigial and was supposed to vanish even before
birth, only being present in the embryo.
It was only in the 1990s that it was “rediscovered” although it had been
known since the 19th century.
The function of such an organ is not yet truly understood but it may yet
prove to be part of an “awareness” system that is related to our intuitive and
instinctive behaviour, hence part of our sense of what we may loosely call
smell.
I think Aromatherapy should be celebrating the power of
odour, the power of aroma, the power of communicative molecules in aroma. I accept that this is difficult if you use
standardised industrial materials with little or no true odour. These poor imitations of nature, these blends
of chemistry that conform to standard reference texts – may never even have
seen or been a flower or leaf or root, yet they are increasingly what
pharmacies want. Their dull flatness of
fragrance does not expand the mind, do not make you tingle with anticipation or
just do something inexplicable. Rather
like many modern day perfumes compared to their 19th and early 20th
century counterparts, just give you a headache.
Are they banned and pilloried?
No. After all they undoubtedly
conform to umpteen safety regulations which essential oils in nature do not.
Sometimes one wonders if these safety scientists have a clue
about the origin of some of the materials they study. According to their theories and regulation, a
person standing in a garden designed for the blind, redolent with the smell of
roses, full of the fragrance of Jasmine, with the sharp smell of contrasting
Rosemary should at least be sneezing and at least be in danger of irritation to
cancer from the air soaked in methyl eugenol, methyl chavicol, camphor and
limonene etc. Information is there for
us to use and note, placing that along side our human experience and much
regulatory information needs considerable common sense applied to it. Aroma is a powerful tool for our memory, for
our immune system. An essential oil
should sparkle out of the bottle and give of itself a certain indefinable
power.
We should not be ashamed of such thinking, trying to hide
behind quasi chemistry to justify the fact that smells work. Essential oils can vibrate with life. Not everybody living before the latter half
of the 20th century was ignorant or unenlightened about such
matters. We owe much to people like
Aristotle, Avicenna and Descartes. They
contribute to a fund of human knowledge that is part of the joy of human
experience. We should be grasping this
knowledge and applying this knowledge but yet realising that in health and well
being everyone is an individual, realising that the mass medication of the
latter half of the 20th century has had phenomenally good results
but strangely has not improved the overall position of what we call health and
well being. At the same as we have seen
the rise of modern medicine we have seen the rise of disease, especially of the
auto immune system and the so called mystery illnesses. If mass medicine works, that doesn’t make a
lot of sense.
In the modern world, it would take a huge shift of thinking
to get people to accept smell therapy, aroma therapy. It is most unlikely to happen but we can work
quietly, recommending the concept that smells do you good, make for a better
life and simply give your body system a better chance of self correction where
possible. What a pleasure it is to smell
a rose and drink in its perfume in the evening without having to worry about
its methyl eugenol content, knowing that the real life experience of human
beings is that we are great survivors with something that sticks out of the
front of our head called a nose that tells us more than we probably realise.
© Jan Kuśmirek 2014
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