I recently experienced a bit of a hair disorder. It just started falling out, leaving bald spots. I found out what it’s called: alopecia areata. Other than get a crew cut (or shave it all off), I wondered what could be done about it. Well, turns out that there are some options. You can go to the doctor and get some high-tech medicine or get steroid shots. Or you can do the rogaine thing. Or, you can go natural with essential oil therapy. There was actually a medical study in 1998 that showed that essential oils worked about as well as anything else. So, I’m going the natural route.
It’s still too early to tell if it’s going to work. Nonetheless, this got me interested in the overall topic of aromatherapy. I decided to buy about 9 or 10 different oils to mix and sniff. Some of them supposedly have beneficial medicinal or psychological effects (although they can also have negative effects if used wrongly). So I did some Internet research.
As with all of the “alternate therapies”, there’s a lot of info out there on aromatherapy and essential oils, and not all of it is informative. There are too many people who believe in herbs and oils, like they were some kind of religion. Thus, the info that you get regarding a particular remedy for a particular condition is not always trustworthy. Case in point: I was looking up the use of various essential oils for a particular condition that I occasionally suffer from, a rather eschatological condition. Some of the herbal books and web sites strongly recommend the use of myrtle oil for it. But then, other sites say that myrtle oil can be irritating to that part of the body. One or two sites say both things! Same wackiness for supplements; I read how zinc does wonders for everything, including the prostate. And then I read that zinc increases the chance of prostate cancer.
So, is herbal / alternative healing just a bunch of bunk? I don’t think so. I believe that there are some home remedies that can do you some good. But you need to do your research. One really good starting point is the federal National Institute of Health’s web site on alternate remedies. It lists a bunch of herbs and supplements and then rates them for a variety of conditions that they allegedly help heal. Most of the ratings given by the government are “unknown, no good studies confirming this”. There are a few clear cases like saw palmeto and prostate enlargement, where the remedy can be helpful (but you still need to see your doctor about serious stuff like this). And there are some cases where the remedy is found to be harmful! But mostly it’s “no real harm, but no real help either”. However, many times that just means that the medical establishment hasn’t gotten around to studying the issue yet. They definitely need to be less pig-headed about stuff like this (and likewise, the herbal freaks need to come out of the clouds and stop trying to “heal by faith”).
Two more good web sites on alternative medicine: