Excellent Aromatherapy Guide

This section looks at the healing properties of essential oils, and how they can help us regain and maintain health and wellbeing. A large part of this section comprises of common ailments and minor injuries, together with advice on how to treat them using essential oils. This aspect of aromatherapy, which focuses on physical wellbeing, is of great benefit in daily life.

As well as helping to heal on a physical level, a corresponding feeling of satisfaction and empowerment arises from treating yourself, your friends and family with aromatherapy. Working within an holistic framework, aromatherapy helps you take responsibility for everyday health care. This harks back a few generations, to a time when it was commonplace for the mother or grandmother of the family to keep a store of herbal remedies at home and look after the family’s health.

Medical aromatherapy

The healing power of essential oils is utilized in a medical context in France where some doctors undertake postgraduate specialization in aromatherapy. They practice medical aromatherapy, which is quite different from the way aromatherapy is practiced in the more common therapeutic context.

Medical aromatherapy largely uses prescriptions of essential oils for internal use. The oils are measured and encapsulated in a gelatine capsule and taken orally, according to the prescription. Although this is clearly not within the remit of therapeutic aromatherapy, which never prescribes the internal use of essential oils (except garlic capsules), medical aromatherapy nonetheless demonstrates the extensive range and power of essential oils to aid the healing process.

In this section you will also learn how to use aromatherapy for babies, children, pregnant women and the elderly. All these groups of people are slightly vulnerable, and require gentler and sometimes slightly different treatment from healthy adults. The essential oils used on them are often considerably more diluted. However, once you have learned the guidelines for working with these groups of people, aromatherapy can be of great benefit for them.

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