Huckstering, Dangerous Quackery, and Why I'm Still Here

Bear with me everybody. I feel like I need to purge all the negative stuff about my experience with oils before I can truly move forward, open minded, in my experiments with them. The last post focused on the multi-level marketing salesmanship surrounding the oils world,

and this one is going to focus on the way Jane Average is using them for medicinal purposes.

If you are a member of any of the numerous social media forums dedicated to the use of essential oils, you will read a lot of intriguing stories from users. There are lots of questions about how to treat specific maladies, and there are plenty of fantastic sounding testimonies which sound pretty legit unless you have this darn nursing background, and can blow holes in their stories as wide as that iceberg did to the Titanic.

Example? Ladies who swear oils cured their ailment, when in fact oils had nothing to do with it. Case in point? A mom of a toddler posted a picture of her rash, along with an explanation that her child had a fever a couple of days before the rash appeared. The picture, to the medically trained, is a classic case of Roseola, a benign, self limiting viral rash. Fellow oilers threw out lots of suggestions for how to treat this rash, diagnosed the rash as multitudes of WRONG things. This rash needed no treating. Lavender, everyone said. Melaleuca, frankincense...put it on the rash diluted, put it on the rash neat, diffuse it, swallow some OnGuard beadlets yada yada. And do you know what?! The rash went away! Mama, I hate to tell you, but that rash was going away whether you slathered that baby in voodoo juice, or you didn't. But if you don't know, you don't know. And THIS is how essential oil huckstering capitalizes on the medically naive.

I mentioned in my post Wacky and Weird the way oils are used for some bizarre things, like expelling demons from one's kitchen. I won't rehash that. I will just say that on any day, there are dozens of posts on these Facebook sites from people who are "treating" common ailments that normal, busy people usually just ignore as a minor inconvenience. Everything from hiccups to hang nails, to mosquito bites. Helpful oilers will say, "I have an oil for that!" I say, "why do you need to fix what doesn't need fixing?" Then there are the oilers who are just flat out dangerous, when they advise people to use oils when what the ailment warrants is a doctor. Example: a mom posted a picture of her son's massively swollen eyelid. Huge blepharitis. Probably periorbital cellulitis, that without prompt antibiotic treatment could lead to abscess, meningitis, hydrocephalus, blindness...you know, bad stuff. But hey, it's just your eye, so by all means, trust the advice of strangers on a social media site who wouldn't pass a pathophysiology test if their own eyeballs depended on it. You can't argue with them. They have done their "research," which never involves reading a medical journal or taking an entry-level biology course.They mean well, but they are not doctors. So this ticks me off.

Then there are reasonable oilers.There are experimenters like me. There are those who are truly interested in the mechanism of action at a molecular level. We see straight through the endorsements and "education" of the paid spokesmen, former doctors and nurses, who now own stock in the MLM oil company. We're drawn to the legitimate possibilities of oils over other non-medical pursuits, such as buying that supplement from GNC or Complete Nutrition that guarantees you will drop two pants sizes, increase your metabolism, and supercharge your sex drive if you just spend $49.99 on their gallon bucket of powder drink mix.
And so I am still here, the Newbie Oiler, and the journey continues. To keep your attention, I now present this:

Six, 15ml bottle of essential oils, for a grand total of $28 and change, including shipping. Experiment ON! Details to follow!

Is is More about Getting Healthy, or More about Getting Paid?

In my last blog entry, which by the way, was so scandalous it got me banned and blocked from my local oil group’s facebook site, I mentioned that I was wresting with the use of essential oils as a treatment modality, and with the multilevel marketing scheme that inflates prices and creates brand loyalty through brainwashing.

Man, did I ignite a crap storm.

Apparently, administrators of the Facebook site felt my line of questioning was NOT TO BE TOLERATED, and needed to be SQUASHED before any of the other sheep under their “care” could read it and be de-programmed. This was all done under the guise of keeping the site “positive,” as I was told by a friendly insider. No one contacted me before I was summarily dismissed. I was viewed as a threat for thinking, and expressing those thoughts in writing among people who had previously stated they were all about educating one another, and learning from each other’s successes and failures. I think their idea of what education is, and what it actually is, are at opposite ends of a spectrum.

Of course I predicted this, and thus named the title of that entry “Ready to Be Ex-communicated.” That is precisely what happened. I threatened their cash-flow.

Back in the early 90’s, some people I went to church with at the time were distributors for Amway, which was, if you don’t know, a multilevel marketing scheme selling health and beauty products and home cleaning goods. It was the fad of the day, as was Herbalife. They were fantastic salesmen. They had to be, to convince a single, 20-something with a very tiny income that I should buy hugely overpriced laundry detergent. This laundry detergent was exceptional though, they claimed. It had been “tested” and “certified” and was the “only” pure detergent that wouldn’t harm my skin or my clothes or the environment.  They were not as forthcoming about how they were getting a piece of the pie, and the distributor above them was getting a piece of that pie, and the uppermost level distributors were making bank off my naivety. Live and learn.

Fast forward twenty years to the current MLM fad, essential oils. DoTerra and Young Living make the same claims. Their products are the “only” oils that are “pure,” or “certified therapeutic grade,” or “tested,” which are terms that are actually meaningless and not associated with any independent quality testing standards or FDA regulation. DoTerra says that their oils undergo testing from three independent labs, whom of course DoTerra pays. Draw your own conclusions about the impartiality of their findings.  Oil companies could bottle up dog urine, label it as God’s own sweat, and there is no regulation that will challenge it. Are their products of high quality? Maybe. Can I get the same quality from a non-MLM company for a fraction of the price? I’m about to find out. It might be like in the world of cosmetics, where you really do get what you pay for, where Urban Decay and MAC beat the tar out of Wet-N-Wild and Maybelline. Maybe DoTerra is the premier oil producer. Maybe $5/bottle oil is horribly, woefully inferior. Or, maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle.

I have an order of oils arriving in two days from a non-MLM health company. Average price for a 15ml bottle is around 5 bucks. Stay tuned for my impressions J

Ready to be Ex-Communicated From the Oils World

It's been awhile since I wrote a blog entry here. I've been wrestling with myself, my science background, my understanding of pathophysiology and disease processes. The skeptic in me has won out for the past months, and although I keep getting my monthly shipments of oils from The Company, the orders have been getting smaller. As the next month's order comes due to be shipped, I can think of nothing I actually want. This post is overtly negative, overtly critical, and overtly thought-provoking. If challenges to the use of oils, and to your particular brand are offensive to you, stop reading now. If you can stand the scrutiny of a critical thinker, read on.

I have been thinking of the almost-religious zeal with which some oilers profess complete alliance to The Company, and I began to wonder if, because they are themselves spending hundreds of dollars a month on the products, and because their own financial gain from the business side of selling oils is at risk if their product was only so-so, have they come to believe their own talking points as holy doctrine? Is it possible, that if The Company packaged their product in a generic-labeled vial, sold it at Walmart, and asked for no multi-level marketing buy-in, would the users have as stunning of success stories? How much of the use of these oils is because the oils work, and how much is because The Company has a brilliant marketing scheme with millions of devotees?

I ordered The Company's #1 selling product, the combo-vitamin/supplement trio. It's a lot of pills, and its pricy. But, if it did what everyone says it does in terms of boosting energy and increasing overall feelings of wellness, it might be worth it. The man and I began with half the daily recommended dose. After three weeks, nothing. I was ok with feeling nothing after one week, even two weeks, but after three weeks??? Disappointment. I quit. If I had bought a product at Walmart that failed to deliver on its promises after three weeks, I would toss it, as would most people, and admit that I'd been suckered by a slick advertisement. I'm sure some will say I didn't give it enough time, or should have taken the full 12-pills-a-day dose. Maybe they are right. Or maybe I just saved myself almost $900/year on placebos.

The other thing that feeds my skepticism is reading the posts on the social media sites from fellow oilers. Once in awhile, someone will post about side effects they are having from using an oil, or lack of achieving the intended benefit from using them. The respondents always have the same answer. The oil isn't the problem, YOU are. YOU are toxic. You are having negative effects because the oils are ridding you of the bad things in your body, and its manifesting in rashes, or headaches, or breathing difficulties, or whatever is happening to the oiler. Or, the respondent will tell them they are sensitive to that particular oil, and they should try something else. The nurse in me says, if I take XYZ blend, and my hair starts falling out, and I quit using XYZ blend and my hair stops falling out, maybe I wasn't the problem and maybe the XYZ blend was.Also, the concept among oilers that so many ailments we suffer can be chalked up to having raging Candida infections is categorically, scientifically FALSE, yet even the medically trained oilers among us will testify that this is TRUE, and push products that will fix this "overgrowth of yeast." The point at which cult-like devotion to medically unsound concepts trumps evidence-based, provable, re-creatable science is the point at which I have to check out.

So where does these leave me in my journey with essential oils? I don't know. I may do some experimenting. If a bottle of $30+ with shipping oregano can burn off a skin tag, maybe I will buy the $8 bottle of oregano from the health store and see if it too can effectively treat another skin tag. I know some of you just gasped in horror. The hospital system for which I work does NOT use The Company's products. In fact our clinic pharmacy sells what they do use for about $8/bottle, and the patients are benefitting.  I am not sure if my skepticism is more heavily questioning the concept of oils in healing, or about The Company's multi-level marketing dogma that is making some people at the top extraordinarily wealthy, while the thoroughly brain-washed, average Joe is shelling out double digits for it spuriously effective product.

If I need to be ex-communicated now for having raised these issues, I understand. It is, no doubt, heresy to some. I also invite considerate feedback in the comments section here, if someone wishes to point out flaws in my thinking. I am eager to keep learning. I love a good debate. I am not here to antagonize, or to ridicule, or to tell others what to believe, or to convince anyone what they should and shouldn't spend their money on, but to provoke thought. If you are also, let's hear it!