It seems to be one of the latest marketing hypes. Currently, you can't buy any product which smells - from toiletries to washing up liquid - without someone telling you that they are practising aromatherapy. But are they?
The word sounds like it relates to making people feel better using nice smells, and this seems to be the interpretation encouraged by much of the marketing. Actually, it has a rather more precise meaning.
The term aromatherapy was coined (see history of aromatherapy) by a French chemist who stumbled on the therapeutic effects of the essential oils used in his family's perfume business, and was later used by Dr Jean Valnet as the title for the publication of his programme of the treatment of specific medical and psychiatric disorders with essential oils.
So what 'aromathérapie' means is the practice of treatment using essential oils from plants. The AOC (Aromatherapy Organisations Council) describes aromatherapy as 'the systematic use of essential oils in holistic treatments to improve physical and emotional well-being'.
The name seems to imply that the oils interact via the sense of smell, and that the effect is entirely psychological. This gives a wholly wrong impression; the oils are not sniffed, but applied with a variety of methods, and interact with someone in various modes - pharmacologically, physiologically and psychologically.
The method of application most favoured by professional aromatherapists is massage - typically a full body massage. This exploits the psychological effect to the full; the feeling of the therapist's hands and the stillness of the experience creating an appropriate environment in which healing can take place. Massage on its own is a great promoter of healing, and the experience is pleasurable enough to encourage a return visit - a cynic might point out that a massage will also command a higher fee than the other treatment methods! There is physical interaction on a smaller scale too, though. The essential oil is absorbed through the skin, and carried around the body in the blood.
Other methods of application, which lend themselves better to self-administration, are baths, hot and cold compresses, vaporisation and steam inhalation. Despite what you may read, essential oils should not be taken internally, especially undiluted, except under the supervision of a doctor.
The approach taken by an aromatherapist will take into account not just particular symptoms of the person seeking help, but their mind, body and spirit, and further their lifestyle (patterns of eating, sleeping etc.) and their interactions with their environment (relationships with people, nature, physical surroundings).
This means that aromatherapy should not be viewed in isolation, but in the context of other therapies which it may complement. It also makes an aromatherapy treatment more difficult to validate using the conventional scientific approach of isolating a single variable for comparison than for example a new drug treatment in allopathic ('orthodox') medicine. This should not be taken as an excuse to substitute hearsay for proper validation of aromatherapy techniques, but instead taken as a challenge.
