Better Living Without Chemicals Aromatherapy Products For A Healthier Life

The cultural revolution that took place in the 1960s made way all too soon for the end of the century a time of bulk manufacturing, synthetic products and the idea that better living came through the chemical compounds found in a lab. Aromatherapy products, which had started to take hold of Western consciousness in the 1960s, fell by the wayside as big companies employing even bigger doctors exclaimed the virtues of chemical preparations from every magazine and in every film.

As the century fell, though, so did the magic chemical preparations that were supposed to keep everyone young; and the infallible medicines that were supposed to stop them all from getting ill. Overuse of antibiotics rendered synthesised medicines a lot less useful than they should have been, while chemically based stimulants and depressants used to anchor the wildly changing moods of Western citizens did as much harm as they did good. The way was open for a resurgence of interest in aromatherapy products preparations distilled from naturally-occurring materials (mostly recognisable plants) that purported to do only good, and a lot more of it than the good done by chemical medicines.

The thing about aromatherapy oils then, as now (and, indeed, as it will always be), was, and is, this: theyre very, very unlikely to do anyone any harm. Unlike antidepressants, for example, which repeatedly come under fire for their sometimes appalling physical and mental side effects. Soothing lavender oils or extracts of St Johns Wort, claim the advocates of aromatherapy products, can have as much of a beneficial effect as pharmaceutically derived tablets but without the worrying and sometimes unpredictable catalogue of side effects the little pills can bring.

Aromatherapy has history on its side: people have been using essences of plants for centuries to cure everything from backache to madness. Pharmaceutical cures have only really been used during the last 100 years. That means were only just starting to understand the long term effects of pharmaceuticals (is it any coincidence, one wonders, that the robustness of our children seems diminished on a yearly basis?), while the long term effects of aromatherapy products are already way out in the open. There arent any. The use of oils and extracts to promote health and well being is such a passive form of treatment that, in a way, it should really be open to everyone.

This leads us to another interesting digression on the theme of pharmaceuticals versus natural remedies. Its no secret that the reason aromatherapy, and other alternative (even the word is used pejoratively) therapies were damned out of court by the very people whose livelihoods stood or fell by the use of synthetic medicine. The use of plant oils and other aromatherapy products were painted as suspicious, even witchery. In actual fact, aromatherapy is entirely natural, completely risk free and seems backed up by hundreds of years worth of successful results. No-one is suggesting that the march of scientific progress has been in vain what they are suggesting, though, and rightly so, is that the benefits of alternative therapies may be far greater than weve all been led to believe.