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