What is Aromatherapy?

I believe that for every illness or ailment known to man, that God has a plant out here that will heal it. We just need to keep discovering the properties for natural healing. I used to be a manicurist because I knew that the job was easily to get the cross-infected and I heard about the effects of the essential oils, so I started using lavender to disinfect, sterilize, and even stop bleeding after over cuticle cuts. Apart from that, I use it on the wounds every time, all of these were very effective as the wound heals quikly as very next day. In this way, I began to have greater interest in essential oils.

Aromatherapy is more thoroughly defined as the skilled and controlled use of essential oils for physical and emotional health and well-being. Science is now confirming what has been known for centuries: essential oils have healing properties on both physical and emotional levels. Absorbed through the skin and via the olfactory-brain connection through inhalation, they have been considered among the most therapeutic and rejuvenating of all botanical extracts throughout the ages.

During the early twentieth century, a French chemist by the name of Rene-Maurice Gattefosse began researching the medical properties of essential oils. It is Gattefosse who is credited with having coined the term “aromatherapy.”

The story of Gattefosse accidentally burning his arem very badly while conducting an experiment in a perfumery plant is well known. There are many different version about how Gattefosse on “reflex” plunged his arm into a large vat of lavender. Whether he knew it was lavender or thought it was water, the story goes that Gattefosse experienced rapid healing on his burn with very little scarring of tissue. According aromatherapist Robert Tisserand, Gattefosse tells how he rinsed both his badly burned hands with lavender oil which stopped “the gasification of the tissue” that had started. Gas gangrene is a serious and often fatal infection with a 20 to 25 percent mortality rate. Gattefosse further reported that he sweated profusely after the treatment with lavender essence and that his hands showed signs of healing by the very next day.

As essential oil are highly aromatic, many of their benefits are obtained simply through inhalation. Our sense of smell is closely linked to memory, mood and emotion. It is well known that aroma reaches and influences our deepest primitive instincts. When essential oils are diffused and inhaled, aromatherapy not only deliver the calming benefits of fragrance, but also deliver many health benefits unique to essential oils.

The use of plants and herbs is the oldest form of healing disease and pain, and the medicinal effects of plants have been recorded in the oldest writings in history, myth and folklore. Records found in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese manuscripts show that priests and physicians were using plant aromatics thousands of years before the birth of Christ to heal the sick and infirm.