And I'm seeing how many of you know something about essential oils or you've used essential oils in some way and I'm hoping that this morning is going to be more about teaching you a little bit of fundamentals about what they are and how to use them and I will tell you some things about how they're being used in clinical settings right now but rather than giving you a formula use this oil for this. I really want you to understand a little bit more about what they are because there are there are some dangers. Plants have been our medicines for forever and historically all types of healers including nurses physicians have used plants for their therapies in fact when. I was in nursing school in the 1970s. Some of my textbooks had recipes for plant-based therapies. And and so it hasn't been that long since at least in nursing and in medicine also of that plants have been a part of our repertoire and in most of the world plants remain the major medicines that are used so essential oils are used for aesthetics for relaxation for health and all those are legitimate uses but most people don't really know what they are so essential oils are concentrated botanical substances and. I mean really concentrated. They're about a hundred times more concentrated than the plants from which they come and they're obtained primarily through distillation and a process called expression which is kind of like you know when you grate a lemon or you mash. Up the peels it's used primarily for citrus plants any essential oils are found in all parts of plants not all not all plants produce essential oils but they are found in all parts of plants. I think I skipped one. Yeah okay so essential oils you all know that. Primary metabolism of plants is called photosynthesis well plants also have secondary pathways of metabolism. And then there are there are many products that come from those secondary pathways and some of them are pretty familiar as medications. You know you look at steroids and bitters and alkaloids and many of these plant products are used in some of the medicines that have been that are used.

In the pharmaceutical industry and essential oils are one of those secondary metabolites of plants and many plants have nothing it examined. We know that about 3,000 plants or probably about one percent of the plants that are on the face of the earth you know have our are known to produce essential oils. They can be found in any part of the plant. For example for rosemary a lot of culinary herbs the essential oils are in the low leaves and as we learned this morning you know time produces time all which is one of the chemicals. That's in the essential oil so it all kind of fits together you know in the plant world if this is going ahead by itself fruits. I have a major fruits that I'm thinking of are the citrus fruits. They all produce essential oils in their peels. And so when your zesting a lemon in your kitchen you're rupturing the essential oil stacks that are in the peeling and they're volatile so they come up and you smell them. And and that's the essential oil that you're smelling and so that's gathered out of citrus peels to make those little bottles of essential oils that you buy at the store. Now we get a lot of clues from looking at how plants produce essential oils and why they produce them so a plant might produce an essential oil to prevent or treat infections bacterial fungal viral infections to attract pollinators. You can think of some of some of the floral oils you know. The lavender is the ones that come from flowers. Some of those are produced by the plant to attract pollinators to repel things. And that's an important. That's an important thing to think about. Because sometimes plants produce essential oils in order to keep other things away you know to be a poison to keep animals from eating the leaves that eating their leaves or to create a zone of inhibition around itself so other plants can grow and that gives us our first clue that essential oils can have adverse effects as well as therapeutic effects you know and also to communicate and to prevent dehydration so if you think about walking through a pine forest on a on a hot summer day and there's that that smell of pine in the air the pine needles produce an essential oil and that is released on hot summer days and it pre creates kind of a fog in the forest that helps keep moisture in to the environment so there are lots of lots of ways that plants can use essential oils and.

I just want you to and we're not going to focus on this today we don't have time but I want you to see essential oils within a continuum of plant products. And so if you have the whole plant over there and we heard about some whole plant products this morning when we when we learned about spices and herbs you have extracts or tinctures and then you have flower essences you have homeopathic remedies that actually contain no molecules of the substance that they're made from essential oils are kind of in the middle and when they're produced by distillation. There are two things that that are. The two things are the products one of them is called a hydrosol or a hydrous hydrolat. And it's like like if we took you know it takes like two to three tons of rose petals to make a teaspoon or I will make a kilogram of rosy seneschal oil. It's very that's why it's such an expensive essential oil and if you're getting a good deal you're probably not getting the right thing right the real thing because it can't be produced for that but so if we take these rose petals that are collected or just just before dawn around dawn by people picking one rose at a time by hand and it takes two to three tons to make a kilogram of rose oil most of what happens when those rose petals are distilled becomes a hydrosol or Hydra lot and that's rose water so we've all seen rose water and we've all used it in cooking or in cosmetics. It's used for a lot of things but I only want you to understand from this that those two things are the the rose water and the Roses.

The roses essential oil come from that distillation product process the historically essential oils have been you for a long time some say thousands of years. The early earliest distillation apparatus has been estimated to be about five thousand years old and that was one of the things that was distilled they've been used all over the world in Egypt for embalming in traditional Chinese medicine essential oils are used in ayurvedic medicine. Essential oils play a role so they're used in a lot of different contexts in modern. Western history essential oils were really resurrected and taken from the perfume industry and the cosmetics industry in the nineteen in the early 1900s and there was a French man named Caiaphas a who had a was a chemist and he had a laboratory explosion. He injured his hand. It became the wound became gangrenous and for some reason he's put his hand in a bowl of lavender essential oil and He healed entirely and he spent the rest of his life trying to promote the use of essential oils for healthcare purposes. And then I just have this other bottle if you can see it it's a it's an old bottle of Listerine so the major component of Listerine is an essential oil that therapeutic component so. We're not going to focus on chemistry this morning but I want you to know that the eight central oils are very complex so each each essential oil is composed of well anywhere from a hundred to two hundred three hundred. It's separate chemical constituents and this makes them a little harder to understand than a single synthetic chemical that is produced in a laboratory and is exactly the same every single time. So it's not soils come from plants. They're part of the natural world complexity and interrelationships are inherent in you know all natural products and substances and the chemistry of the plant. Depends on how the plant lived and how it died to all kinds of things can affect the chemistry of an of an individual plant so lavender will be different if it grows at a different altitude.

The chemistry will be different if it was a year with not very much rainfall it's going to be a little bit different all of those things affect the chemistry of the essential oil and Unknowing. The chemistry of the oil can give us some clues. You know for example when I look at if I look at the chemistry the chemical makeup of an essential oil and I notice. Well it's really high in this. It probably has this type of therapeutic property so essential oils although they're part of integrative health care and integrative healing they can be used like pharmaceuticals and. I think that's one of the dangers of aromatherapy. Is that you know a nurse. Could you know walk into a hospital room with a little cotton ball with essential oils on it and flop it down and leave the room and that would be no more a therapeutic interaction than handing somebody a pill so I always try to teach people to use essential oils in a holistic manner if we're going to use them and that was just a chemist a chemical readout for lavender it's a gas chromatography mass spectrometry reading and that's how we would know what the chemistry of an essential oil is a little bit about. How you about storage and integrity there's a lot you. I mean you're bombarded with information from companies that are spelling essential oils about you know the the therapeutic quality of very essential oils a lot of language is used and I would caution. You that therapeutic grade is not any kind of a recognised designation there's no body that goes around the country to different companies and says you know we are an independent agency and we tell people you know that their therapeutic grade or they're not therapeutic grade that's just a it's a grading system that the company has developed for itself and you can believe them or not believe them but there are many many many good companies not just a few essential oils need to be handled properly.

So when you buy that little bottle at the co-op or at the grocery store or the natural food store or online you want to store it properly. I recommend that people keep them in the refrigerator. And if you do that you can keep them for a year or maybe two years if you're not using them very often keep the keep them tightly capped because they oxidize if they're exposed to air heat or light and that's really important because once they oxidize they're more likely to cause sensitivities and irritation and that's been you know well documented in a number of studies if you're going to use essential oils. I would recommend that you start with just a couple know the Latin name of the plant because for example lavender and there are several species of lavender there are Kimo types they have very different chemistries and thus they have very different therapeutic activity. Now that might seem like a hard example but once you know a couple it you know it sort of starts to roll off your tongue lavandula angustifolia. Melaleuca alternifolia that kind of thing so if you do know that species of the plant and the Latin name then you know you're getting the right thing that you want so not. All lavenders are relaxing essential oils can be adulterated. They can be contaminated with metals. Plastics other solvents there are lots of good companies around. They can be adulterated again but the most important thing. I think for safety and toxicity and then I won't say any more about that. But that's found it really foundational essential oils can be toxic. They can be unsafe for certain people in certain situations and that's always related to the chemistry. Some essential oils contain chemicals that that can be toxic that are toxic to the liver some essential oils contain chemicals that can be carcinogenic the most common oils the ones that are used in clinical settings and we'll talk about those a little later. You're not going to have many problems.

With and dose dose is really important so use less rather than more very difficult to do because once you start getting into essential oils a lot of them smell pretty good. They'll make might make you feel pretty good. I'm it's very tempting to use more than you really need for general safety keep them out of reach of children use less rather than more do not ingest essential oils. Unless you really know what you're doing in France. They do a lot of a lot of ingestion of essential oils. But you have to be a specially trained physician or pharmacist in order to prescribe them in that way now. I'm not know it's likely that if you take a drop of an essential oil if you have a cold or something like that. That's not going to be a problem. But in general you want to know what you're doing is they're going to be ingesting them don't apply undiluted essential oils to mucous membranes. But many of them can burn. Burn your skin and also take precautions with photo toxicity and what. I mean there is. In general don't use citrus oils on your skin unless you know something about essential oils because many of the citrus oils can be photo toxic and that means that they that you can get severe burns if you have them on your skin and you go out into the Sun so I we recommend 18 hours no sun exposure for areas of the skin that have been exposed to citrus oils. Okay now I probably scaring everybody and I don't want to do that but this was like you know some basic things. Keep them away from the eyes. They'll really hurt if they get in your eyes. Don't use them undiluted on the skin so always you're always going to be using them. Diluted they're very strong remember that 100 times stronger than the plants that they came from so other botanicals you can use fairly freely and and not worry so much about toxicity and in fact most essential oils. You're not going to have problems with either but there are some that are fairly fairly dangerous so if you'd for skin irritation some people if they have if they're really prone to skin irritation they want to be really careful with these sensual oils.

Maybe use them at less than a 1% dilution and then I've listed for you a few oils that are especially prone to oxidation and that you want to be careful that you don't keep them for years and years and years and and not use them. This was an interesting study that really showed that the chemistry changed markedly for an essential oil bottle that was opened every day and left and left opened compared to one that was kept closed so and once the chemistry changes. You don't know what you've got because you no way to measure like what exactly has changed in that in that oxidation process so you can have chronic toxicity. The literature is full of case studies of children. People who have used a lot of essential oils especially orally and end up in the emergency room with you know. Signs of sort of chronic toxicity like headaches nausea. Lethargy 's skin problems that can be really hard to figure out what for pets. I would recommend for some things. Essential oils are used in veterinary medicine now especially for dogs and horses and they're and they're really quite effective for some conditions. Cats not so much and you know people have killed their pets with essential oils by you know dipping a little dog and you know a fairly strong essential oil solution for fleas and yeah there are many essential oils. That can be good for fleas and and pests but you want to be really careful in just about any symptoms or any health condition can be addressed with essential oils and we apply them. There are several ways to apply them. I'm not going to focus on the gut because we're not ingesting them. But if you breathe in essential oils they go both to the brain and to the lungs so mostly they go to the lungs but some of those molecules some of those chemicals that are in the essential oils go to the brain. There's only one synapse from the nose to the brain and the essential oils affect both the emotional brain.

You know the part that now gives us our emotions and memories and those kinds of things and also the cortex or our thinking brain so in many studies that show that certain essential oils affect both emotional states anxiety. Depression sleep and physical states blood pressure respirations cognitive abilities and then the skin so a lot of essential oils are applied with the skin and probably only about 10 percent of an essential oil. That's applied to the skin will actually be actually be absorbed into the bloodstream. So it's not a lot and then. I want to just give you a little information and some suggestions. If you're because people always ask well how do i dilute them. You know what do i dilute them in. Well you can use any kind of a vegetable oil or you can use a low. Sometimes you can use water to dilute essential oils but you want to die with them. You know appropriately. So if you're using essential oils over a lot large part of the body. I wouldn't use more than about a 1% dilution and at that at that dilution you probably are not going to have a lot of issues with sensitivity and irritation baths are a wonderful way to use essential oils especially at night before sleeping. Some long-term care facilities have taken to using lavender baths and have been able to cut their use of psychotropic medications by over twenty five percent and then people are not sedated in the morning and they have a better day the next day so this is how I would do a bath. Use a dispersant always use a dispersant. We we don't have time to focus on this a lot but essential oils are not or they're not water soluble and that's important so they're not going to dissolve in that bathtub. You're going to have a little film. On top of all kinds of little droplets of a hundred percent essential oils and so the person is going to have you know undiluted essential oils all over their body when they get up out of the bath.

If it's not if there's no dispersant use so always use a dispersant when you're using essential oils and you the the one you have today involves epsom salts. Epsom salts is a great dispersant for the bath. And so the way you would do that would be maybe mix up at the formula. I you one part baking soda two parts. Epsom salt and three parts sea salt. There are many recipes. You can get online for a basic bath salts and then right before you get in the bath you can mix in three to five drops of an essential oil of your of your choice depending on what your goal is and then you know get in the tub and enjoy and that you know for many reasons can be helpful for sleep. I mean the bath itself without the essential oils might be helpful for sleep so for inhalation you can just put a couple drops on a tissue. That's you know quite adequate. You can use vaporizers or steam or other humidifiers spritzers. I like to you know. Take a spray bottle. Fill it with water. Put it put ten or twenty drops of essential oil in it. If you have like a cup of water and then use that for air freshener so you know there. It would be so easy to just put the air freshener business out of business with essential oils and then you don't have all those chemicals in the air etc steam inhalations. I know many of us probably remember steam inhalations when we had a cold when we were a kid. Just be sure to keep your eyes closed if you're using essential oils with the steam because they can be very irritating to the eyes. There's a lot of research right now. Using essential oils in dentistry as a solution spit to prevent and treat periodontal disease and to prevent caries but these are the ways that essential oils that are off are often used in health care today so most of the hospitals in the Twin Cities have an aromatherapy program. Many of the long-term care facilities are using essential oils and these are the oils that are most commonly used. They're very safe oils. When used in small amounts so lavender probably the most widespread essential oil and it has there's tons of research on lavender it can be used for insomnia pain anxiety headaches agitation.

It's used to reduce pain and during labor and that is usually as an inhalation. You know sometimes the essential oils are used in hand massage. And that's a really nice way that you use essential oils as well. Sweet orange or mandarin are those are two of the citrus oils. That are not photo toxic. So you don't have to worry about them so much as the others and they're often used for symptoms of anxiety for sleep difficulties moodiness frustration and you know how you know most of us when we smell citrus we feel good. It's a nice uplifting sort of smell and you know there are reasons you know studying the chemistry of citrus oils. That that happens but we just part of our part of our culture and they're used a lot for nausea especially nausea and indigestion especially sometimes in long-term care facilities. Amanda and our sweet orange can be used to improve people's appetite so you can put a little patch or a cotton ball on before a meal and people have better appetite and feel better while they're eating ginger. We heard about ginger as an herb and ginger is also an essential oil and it's usually used for nausea lack of appetite thickness fatigue. Ginger has a lot of a certain chemical that is anti-inflammatory. And so it's also a really nice one for joint pain and a massage peppermint and spearmint peppermint is also used for not the a vomiting and digestion. Sort of like the herb itself is used so sometimes the herb can the herb and the essential oils have the same properties and sometimes they don't it depends on whether the chemicals that are causing that therapeutic property are in the essential oil or net peppermint has been used for urinary retention. I mean that for overactive bladder but too for people who have a hard time letting down often when I'm when I go in to talk to nurses I'll say to get ever use essential oils.

And they all say no we never use essential oils and then somebody will say well. We have been using peppermint for urinary retention retention for the last thirty years. So it's it's um. I have not seen a great deal in the literature about that. But it's in common use and in health care. Frankincense is a nice essential oil and being used more in clinical settings. I have some concerns because frankincense is probably not sustainable as a plant. It's overused it's a tree. It takes 30 years to grow and like sandalwood and rosewood the essential oil pressure is probably going to be too much for the for the plants sustainability bergamot is another citrus oil. This one is highly photo toxic but there are some nice studies show. It's pretty good. For mild to moderate depression as an inhalation and then other essential oils that are being used in health. Care tea tree oil. How many of you have used to tree oil. My own research was on tea tree oil and chronic staph infections and. I'm really into tea tree oil. I don't use it very much but for first aid and the potential for it is incredible because it is an amazing antifungal and it is an amazing antibacterial essential oil and it has some analgesic properties. So it helps with pain. And it has anti-inflammatory properties. It helps with inflammation and that is a more clinical at clinical use. But it's great for first aid as well and these are some others that are being used in various clinical settings around our area grapefruit. Grapefruit is an interesting oil because I've read a couple of studies now from Korea that that suggest that grapefruit oil in an abdominal massage can be helpful in reducing abdominal fat among middle-aged women. I thought and that one got my attention so I mean there are lots of interesting things I get all the like. I have a service that sends me all the articles that are written in the scientific literature every week on essential oils and every week I get about 25 articles and you know some of them are interesting and some of them aren't but there is a lot of research happening with essential oils.

Rosemary is a wonderful oil and rosemary traditionally is used for memory and it's being used in a lot of long-term care settings and memory units and. I know three years ago. My grandmother died she was 100 just two weeks short of 107 years old and you know towards the end and she wanted nothing was nothing that she wanted that we could do for her give to her she even lost her taste for cookies. And and so I would take some unscented lotion and use rosemary and sometimes another essential oil along with it and just go at her room and massage her hands and her feet and ask her to tell me about when she was little. Tell me stories about your life and you know it was it gave me something that. I felt like I could do for her and with her and I got to hear some great stories and it seems like it was a really nice thing for her to so there's lots of creative ways to use essential oils around in long-term care. And and just you know just in. In families and hand massage essential oils with hand. Massage is really one of the things that's it can be so wonderful one year. I gave everybody in my family. Some unscented lotion and brought several essential oils and allowed them to choose their own and gave them each a hand massage with their product that I had made and it was so simple and it was so I I think it was my most popular year. A couple of ideas for self-care for improving cognition peppermint rosemary. Basil are the ones that I would go to. There are certain people. That shouldn't use peppermint people have carte cardi active relation. Essentially anybody who has a medical condition for which stimulants are contraindicated. Should not use stimulant essential oils. And that's just kind of like common sense. I think does that make. I hope that makes sense to everybody. We talked about spritzers.

I gave you some little ideas here for products that you can make on your own. This is a spritzer recipe for cold and flu support. That was it was developed by one of my students who's now in charge of Integrative Health and healing for health East and she uses that you know for home and at work Sanders is swear by this formula. I haven't used it myself but it looks like a reasonable cold and flu support recipe you know other things for uplifting for memory we talked about just a word about babies and children. I recommend that if you don't know quite a bit about essential oils don't use essential oils and children under six and also don't use them in pregnant women especially in the first trimester and I know there are a million products out there that have a lot of essential oils in them possibly synthetic possibly natural but I think this is a place where we really need to exercise the precautionary principle a lot of health care in the United States. It goes by the philosophy that if it hasn't been proven harmful then it's okay the precautionary principle says if it hasn't been proven safe then it's not okay and I think for babies and small children and pregnant women. That's where we need to really exercise. The precautionary principle now midwives are using essential oils. They're doing it knowledgeably and appropriately but I'm not a fan of all those products for babies and and children. We talked about that for first aid. A couple things that you should know. Buy a bottle of lavender. I think everybody should have a bottle of true lavender lavandula angustifolia and I've given you the Latin name and a bottle of tea tree oil in your refrigerator and you know why now and to keep them in the refrigerator because they'll oxidize if you if you don't but lavender is the best thing I've ever seen for burns and I have heard hundreds of testimonials about lavender for burns and so if you have a little kitchen burn you know. You've touched the hot pan you know it's going to blister.

It hurts a lot instead of doing what you usually do. Go right to the refrigerator. Take out that lavender put a drop on the burn straight from the bottle. This is a one of the few times you'd use essential oils at 100% concentration and within thirty. Seconds to a minute the pain will be gone within half an hour to an hour. You won't know anything ever happened. There won't be any redness or anything if you get there right away and I I can't tell you the number of testimonials I have heard because I do research on essential oils people. Call me all the time while. I'll use this for this and I use this for this and I'm amazed but the burns that's something to pay attention to and I just heard last week that one of the hospice in st. Paul is starting to use lavender somehow and a burn unit and then tea tree oil Melaleuca alternifolia and it's just wonderful for just you know dirty little wounds cat scratches things that you that you know or you know highly probability of infection tea tree oil can be great for those and that's another and I'm not I'm talking about small things and with the burns to not full thickness burns not over the whole body then go right to the emergency room household uses no I I like to use essential oils when I'm cleaning like if I'm you know I might mix some essential oils in with with baking soda sprinkle it over the carpet and let it sit for a while before I vacuum some people say that if you put a couple drops of the scent of a eucalyptus or a tea tree oil and the rinse water of your laundry it'll kill dust mites I don't know about that and I haven't read anything about that in the literature air cleaning and freshening pests the little peppermint along the baseboard for ants. They hate it some people tell me mice hate it too. I haven't used it that way myself. Close mom's lavender can be nice for repelling close. Moths and other suggestions for self-care. I mean it's wonderful to combine essential oils with with meditation with imagery.

It's not always the first thing that you should be thinking about because it is something. I hope I've given you the idea strongly that you know essential oils are not nothing and so sometimes if you're if you're following the principle that you want to go from the least invasive and the least and intensive treatment like dr. Nilsen talked about with overactive bladder I want to start with the least intensive and sometimes the essential oils are not the least intensive therapy. Maybe imagery maybe an herbal therapy that is has much less risk of toxicity or no risk of toxicity. Use them moderately. I use those little those little inhalers that you have on airplanes and we know how all the areas on airplanes and some I tend to go with something either for sleep so I can black myself out or something that's anti-infectious that I can whip every now and then too we know whether it really doesn't any good I'm not sure but it makes me feel better and like I'm doing something to you know stave off the cold. That's behind me on the airplane. I'm get to know other botanical products too because these are plants and mostly have fun. I mean I I always feel like I should apologize because I'm I don't want to give the impression that people shouldn't use the essential oils or that. They're dangerous in fact they are so much less dangerous than most of the over-the-counter things that people use all the time but I think we who are using newer products trying to promote safe use. We have to be you know. We have to err on the side of safety as we're going forward with this and I always think it's good to express thanks to the plants so those little bottles that they're far away from the plants but it's good to remember that took a lot of plant material to make those little bottles that we take home and you know using a drop or two is often sufficient for most things because this is a clinical area. I just I do want to say that some essential oils you can't generalize about essential oils because they're all different chemically so people say well can you use these essential oils for this or that and I'll always say well which essential oil for.

What because they're different some essential oils will have kind will have contraindications used with certain medications it would be great if I could tell you go to your physician and ask about medication interactions. I would love to know a few physicians that would have that knowledge. So if you do have but I think as a rule of thumb if you are taking medications or you have a condition that you're not supposed to take you know things like if you're not supposed to take stimulants and stay away from the stimulant oils and that kind of thing. I just I wanted to include just some of the articles that I've written about essential oils and I have focused on lavender and tea tree oil. Because there is more research on those than any other counter essential oils so that was the easiest place for me to start with research.