Essential Oils Might Be the New Antibiotics | Hacker News Reader

Essential Oils Might Be the New Antibiotics

theatlantic.com

52 pointsmarcusgarvey46 comments

It's telling that only one of these studies is published in a journal where I can find the full text (with MIT journal access). Sadly, it's only really possible to judge the research in that article, which is questionable. They test the susceptibility of e. coli strains to various oils, at 8-12 uL/mL. I think the only observation one needs point out is that concentration in a person's blood would kill them too. I wish it were otherwise, but you can't believe all peer-reviewed science.

Yeah, totally, that's ridiculous. Essential oils should never be taken internally. Having said that, the oils from most culinary herbs can usually be diluted one drop per litre safely.

I studied herbal medicine formally for four years about ten years ago, and I always just tell people "never take essential oils internally" and they say things like "but what if an Aromatherpist (actually a qualification in Australia) tells me to, to which I reply "never take essential oils internally".

Never take essential oils internally. Unless you want kidney failure.

I wouldn't say never.

A midwife recommended oregano oil for my wife when she couldn't take antibiotics, and we have used it to mitigate sore throats and possible sinus infections ever since. She did say it's not something you want to stay on forever, because that can have its own downside, but its limited toxicity is much better than a bacterial infection or stronger antibiotics, if you can safely avoid them.

This kind of reminds me of all the "X cures cancer" media reports. It's not that hard to kill cancer cells in a petri dish (or in a xenograph model). Tens of thousands of compounds have killed cancer cells in models, but failed entirely in humans.

Yeah, a bullet kills cancer pretty well. The trick is targeting just the cancerous cells.

Reminds me of: http://xkcd.com/1217

Some folks in my circle of friends have been raving about essential oils lately as home remedies for everything from general relaxation, to treating dandruff to avoiding cold/flu symptoms. I'm all about improving our understanding of microbiology and moving away from excessive antibiotics use, but honestly these folks are wellness product hype jumpers though, buying and selling from each other via stay-at-home-mom pyramid type businesses and it's hard not to dismiss it as another way to overcharge pseudo-sciencers

I used to have an incurable sinus infection that plagued me every winter. Antibiotics were worthless. Then, after X-rays confirmed my maxillary sinuses were filled to the brim with crud and doctors wanted to cut out large swaths of my sinuses, I decided to hang upside down on my personal quack theory that it might let them drain.

To my somewhat surprise, every day I did this an unholy brew of dark brown mucus and blood would drain out of my nose after a few minutes. A couple weeks later the crud dissipated and so did the sinus infection. I haven't had a serious infection of more than a few days since 2011.

What's my point? Keep an open mind here. Traditional medicine wasn't the answer here. Homeopathy is nonsense, but there are occasional bits of truth to mine from alternative approaches.

Since most sinus infections are viral, antibiotics probably did nothing at all.

Correct. Northward of 90% of all URTIs (Upper Respiratory Tract Infections) are caused by viruses and never develop secondary bacterial infections. [1]

If you have a bacterial upper respiratory tract infection you usually feel much less well than when the average viral infection.

The usually route of antibiotics appearing to work is that a course of antibiotics is usually 10 days, by which time you're mostly over the viral infection anyway.

1.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3098742/

I feels ya. Surgery sucked.

I wish someone had told me about netty pots, nebulizers, xylitol nasal spray, whatever preventative things to try first. Pre surgery, I was in so much pain, I would have tried anything.

Post surgery, for months, to clear things out, I would lie down face up hanging my head over the edge of the bed, fill up my nostrils with the saline concoction (ABX, steroids), and let it marinate. For as long as I could handle it. Worked pretty good.

It's astonishing how much goop the human head can store up there.

Sounds like both you and traditional medicine were theorizing about the same cause -- you tried a cure that has to be repeated if the situation develops again, while they were aiming at something that might be a permanent fix.

Why did you conclude that traditional medicine wasn't the answer?

Except if you read the experiences of people who get the sinus surgery, it's not a permanent fix and it can go horribly wrong. It just buys one a few years of relief while the creeping crud finds another way to make your life miserable again. You're right that both approaches assumed there was a mechanical/stuctural fix to the problem. It's just that mine was less invasive and IMO the correct first step.

As for the root cause being viral versus bacterial, I suspect it was pneumonia bacteria. There was a frequent peroxide smell to my mucus and said bacteria were cultured repeatedly from the crud.

My gripe is that "essential oil" is only slightly more specific than "chemical", so it's meaningless to talk about essential oils in general as a fix for anything. You need to evaluate them on a case-by-case basis for every use. An arbitrary essential oil is as likely to be a poison as a cure, but they're all lumped together in the hype. And it's not like we didn't already know that plants are a good source of medicines. /rant

Totally. In fact, the fourth thing I think of - after aromatherapy, perfume, and flavouring - is the use of safrole (from sassafras essential oil) in the manufacture of MDMA...

My wife and her friends are into essential oils. I have mixed feelings. Some of the oils do seem to be effective, but there are definite red flags as far as the business behind the oils.

On the shady side, they have the ZYTO hand scanner, a device you place your hand on for a few minutes, and then it tells you all of your deficiencies, and all of the oils you need to buy to fix those deficiencies. My wife and all of her friends swear by this scan, amazed at its accuracy. My scan was not accurate at all. Before the scan, you have to enter your info (name, address, email, etc), so I have always suspected they are using some online marketing database to profile you. If you read about the scanner online, they claim that the reason the scanner doesn't give reproducible results is because it "uses quantum physics", which just screams scam to me.

As far as the oils product itself, I have used several on various skin ailments such as skin tags and warts, and I have been quite impressed at how effective they have been in consistently getting rid of them.

Carl Sagan, in his book Demon Haunted World, described his bologna detection kit, a set of principals and tests used to get a feel for the veracity of a claim. Here is my Medical modality bologna detection kit.

1. It is claimed the modality cures or treats a wide variety of otherwise unconnected symptoms.

2. Claims about the modality are unspecific. "It boosts the immune system." "It removes toxins."

3. It is claimed the modality is as effective as already substantiated treatments but trials are not controlled.

4. Purveyors of the treatment invoke any benefit besides its efficacy and side effect profile. They emphasize its antiquity or how natural it is.

5. Top researchers of the modality stand to profit from positive outcomes of their research.

6. There is no likely way for the treatment to work.

7. Trials are not double blinded.

Slightly off-topic, but a Bologna detection kit wouldn't be that difficult to construct: even standard CV software could detect standard Bologna in standard shape. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_sausage

On the other hand, I imagine Italian bologna is prepared with essential oils, so a working Bologna detection kit would also positively identify essential oils.

On the other hand, Sagan's kit would be quite a useful tool in detecting baloney.

As a non-native speaker, I was particularly thrown off by that, and had to look it up. :)

Do I agree with you! Apply the system to homeopathy, and most of it comes off as baloney. The saddest part is, it is often the people who would benefit from 'actual' medicine the most (the sick and the poor) that also fall into the homeopathy trap. At least in the neck of the woods I am from.

Ha, my mistake. Baloney is a word you hear frequently but don't see written very often. I presumed the slang used the spelling of the sausage it was derived from.

My wife is big into essential oils. She initially bought into the hype. Interestingly the company she started to buy from, has soured her due to their business practices. Among other things selling "pure" oils, that really are not as pure as the claim.

I will say this when she first started with them, I thought it was all voodoo and witchcraft, but after using various oils, I find that certain ones do give relief of certain symptoms. Like we have a blend that "aides" digestion. And when I have heartburn, I rub it on my stomach and within 15 minutes feel better. Is it magic, I have no idea, but it seems to work.

But I also still believe in traditional medicine. If I have an ear infection I'm not going to pour oil in my ear, I'm going to go see a Dr and get a prescription to fix it. I think that there is a group of people out there who are so turned off by the western medical system, that they are looking for anything that they can hook on too, to hopefully provide them with a means to not have to participate in the system.

That's a pragmatic approach drawing information from the sources available and not drawing a hard line anywhere.

I've never been able to understand people's tendency to insist on extremes. If you're Republican, everything Democrat is bad, and vice versa. If you are an advocate for Eastern medicine all doctors are quacks. Yadda yadda yadda. These may be extreme and a bit simplified but the tendency seems to run strong in some point.

Although, to put it in another frame, perhaps the people more likely to espouse their views are also the ones more likely to take a strong stance which means as a result I tend not to hear from the more pragmatic among us.

Just so no one is confused (like I was for a long time), essential oils are so called because they are obtained using plant essences, not because they are essential to us in any way (though they may now be!)

The other ones, the ones we need, are correctly called EFAs - Essential Fatties Acids[1].

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_fatty_acid

It's interesting to hear about the different impacts of essential oils, though when you consider manuka honey also has healing properties as well, it stands to reason that other natural plant extracts could have similar properties.

> it stands to reason that other natural plant extracts could have similar properties.

That's as old as time.

- Lemon skin for stomach flu (Salmonella)

- Garlic for ulcer (H. pylori).

- Onion for food intoxication (E. coli and S. aureus).

- Eucalyptus for general respiratory tract infections.

- Tamarind and cranberry for bladder infection.

- Coconut oil for intestinal parasites.

- Honey (any, not just manuka) as a general anti bactericide.

And more recently we've learned things like:

Cinnamon for stomach ulcer due to inhibitory affect on H. pylori

Cinnamon for blood sugar regulation

Cinnamon for Parkinson's disease

And that's just one of the 214 herbs I've studied intensively.

source for manuka honey healing? what does it heal?

There are several mechanisms at play in honey: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3609166/

I have used essential oils for nearly everything including internal consumption, external issues, cleaning everything(alternative to bleach, etc), veterinary and can say they work. However, there are a lot of claims out there regarding essential oils that aren't true, so make sure you check a reliable source before you proceed.

Quality is very important, all essential oils are not the same.

It takes a lot of self education to take care of your own health but well worth it in the end.

This is so cool:

Other research, from a 2011 issue of BMC Proceedings, showed that adding a combination of plant extracts—from oregano, cinnamon, and chili peppers—actually changed the gene expression of treated chickens, resulting in weight gain as well as protection against an injected intestinal infection.

I have used all three of those as part of my treatment for my health issues, rooted in a genetic disorder. This is just so, so cool.

Changing gene expression happens all the time due to everyday things like: sunlight exposure, amount of fat you eat, how much sleep you get, etc, etc, etc.

So true. "change in gene expression" is one of those three-word-slogans. A change in gene expression occurs ever time we eat as our liver and pancreas ramp up production of various enzymes.

It's probably true that every activity we participate in cause a change in gene expression as the underlying physical manifestation of a change in biochemistry.

Yes, but it excites me because my focus has been figuring out how to change the gene expression using diet and lifestyle. I have gotten a lot of flack off of people. I am excited to see language like this in an article about this kind of "natural" approach.

I know what I am doing. I just don't know how to talk about it with other people and it's been very frustrating. So I find stuff like this interesting.

Thanks for your various comments throughout this discussion.

Shoot me an email, let's have a conversation. I've been studying this sort of thing for over a decade now.

Did your treatment work?

Yes.

It would help hugely if we all become Vegans or at least vastly reduced our meat/fish consumption. Producing meat and animal products is very inefficient in terms of land and resources and encourages the use of antibiotics.

Of course this is a pipe dream and barring a world extinction threat, is never going to happen.

It's far more complex than this. A lot of meat --free-range cattle and sheep particularly--is raised on land which is not arable for traditional crops. Farmed fish too, when farmed responsibly, can provide a lot of food on "land" which could not have produced other food.

But we aren't lacking land to grow food. We have so much of it actually that we use a third of the arable land world wide to grow feed for livestock, (which accounts for 40% all grains grown)[1]. If we just ate this grain instead we could feed 3.5 billions people extra[2].

Cattle (and sheep) are extremely inefficient. We use 60% of all farmland to produce beef, but it only provides us with 2% of all calories (5% of protein)[1]. So, the majority of all pastureland plus a big chunk of the arable land is used to produce 2% of all calories. That's not really much of a resource.

So yes, if we raised cattle purely on pasture (which we don't overall) we could actually get some net production of food. But it would still be an insignificant part of our diet.

[1] Grade A Choice? Solutions for Deforestation-free Meat. Union of Concerned Scientists, 2012: http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/global_warming/Soluti...

[2] Meat and Animal Feed: http://www.globalagriculture.org/report-topics/meat-and-anim...

One issue is that arable land isn't, along with other resources, evenly distributed over the plant, nor do the people have equal access to technology maximise production output.

This is why we need trade, which is arguably better than one form or another of centralised government controlled redistribution.

So the issue isn't, and probably never will be, limits to resources, but limits to human resourcefulness - of which there are none.

As far as I'm aware, fish are fairly land efficient.

But not resource efficient, and farmed fish have lots of problems.

The operative word here is "might". Be sure to read Ioannidis, John PA. "Why most published research findings are false." PLoS medicine 2.8 (2005): e124.

Ehhh... I mean its all malarky till enough experiments have been done to move it into the realm of likelihood.

Naturally this is just a single experiment, but it does offer some statistically significant results for combinations of antibiotics and lavender, peppermint, and cinnamon oils:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23537749

Full text here: http://goo.gl/i6ooUC

The lowest oil concentration they see synergy is 0.078% v/v. Assuming that's roughly the same as w/w%, that's 53 grams of oil that would have to be distributed throughout the body of a 68 kg person.

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