The article below is by Tori Rodriguez and it first appeared in The Atlantic. It strongly affirms what we believe to be the benefits of 100% petrochemical free Essential Oils. My only issue with the article is that the title makes it seem like Essential Oils are new. They are the ORIGINAL antibiotics. They are original medicine…
Faced with increasingly drug-resistant bacteria, scientists and farmers are now looking to plant extracts to keep people and animals healthy.
Essential oils often evoke thoughts of scented candles and day spas, but their benefits beyond relaxation are less well-known. Essential oils are ultimately just plant extracts—and those are used in countless cleaning and personal-care products, and are the main ingredient in some pest-control products and some over-the-counter medications, like Vick’s VapoRub and some lice sprays. They’re used in the food industry because of their preservative potency against food-borne pathogens—thanks to their antimicrobial, antibacterial, and antifungal properties. Various oils have also been shown to effectively treat a wide range of common health issues such as nausea and migraines, and a rapidly growing body of research is finding that they are powerful enough to kill human cancer cells of the breast, colon, mouth, skin, and more.
This is a great article and reminds me of something I quite often encountered in seeing people. Human beings are sponges and will absorb whatever they come in contact with– especially during childhood. If they haven’t learned tools to “wring out the sponge” then those traumas are stuck in the body like energy cysts…
From NPR by Laura Starecheski
In the 1980s, Dr. Vincent Felitti, now director of the California Institute of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, discovered something potentially revolutionary about the ripple effects of child sexual abuse. He discovered it while trying to solve a very different health problem: helping severely obese people lose weight.
Felitti, a specialist in preventive medicine, was trying out a new liquid diet treatment among patients at a Kaiser Permanente clinic. And it worked really well. The severely obese patients who stuck to it lost as much as 300 pounds in a year.
“Oh yeah, this was really quite extraordinary,” recalls Felitti.
But then, some of the patients who’d lost the most weight quit the treatment and gained back all the weight — faster than they’d lost it. Felitti couldn’t figure out why. So he started asking questions.
First, one person told him she’d been sexually abused as a kid. Then another.
“You know, I remember thinking, ‘Well, my God, this is the second incest case I’ve seen in [then] 23 years of practice,’ ” Felitti says. “And so I started routinely inquiring about childhood sexual abuse, and I was really floored.”
More than half of the 300 or so patients said yes, they too had been abused.
Felitti wondered if he’d discovered one of the keys to some cases of obesity and all the health problems that go along with it.
That possibility made him very curious: What if having a bad childhood could affect health in other ways?
The idea that childhood abuse and neglect could affect adult health was a revelation to Felitti. But a poll released Monday (from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) finds that the public widely believes this to be the case today.
How To Measure The Troubles Of Childhood
As he continued to explore the idea in the 1990s, Felitti got together with an epidemiologist named Dr. Rob Anda, who at the time was on staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They came up with a set of questions to trace, in a larger group, how tough childhood experiences might affect adult health.
They called their work the study of Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE.
NPR
First developed in the 1990s, the 10 questions of the Adverse Childhood Experiences test are designed to take a rough measure of a difficult childhood.
The 17,000 or so patients in this study were mostly middle-aged white people, upper- and middle-class, from San Diego. Felitti and Anda asked them to think back to their childhoods and list how many of 10 different types of adverse childhood experiences they’d had, including sexual, physical or emotional abuse; neglect; loss of a parent due to death, divorce or incarceration; mental illness in a parent; and drug or alcohol abuse by a parent.
The researchers wanted to get a sense of how being exposed to these different categories of adverse experience early in life might affect long-term health. So, on Felitti and Anda’s score sheet, having undergone any one of those different categories of trauma or neglect before age 18 would add one point to a person’s ACE score. Whether someone had been sexually abused one time, or dozens of times, the experience would count as one point in their study. Being habitually abused, and losing a parent to death, would add up to an ACE score of 2.
Even though Felitti and Anda were just getting a rough measure of the severity of the patients’ experiences, when Anda’s team at the CDC crunched the numbers, he was shocked.
One in 10 of the patients surveyed had grown up with domestic violence. Two in 10 had been sexually abused. Three in 10 had been physically abused.
“Just the sheer scale of the suffering — it was really disturbing to me,” Anda remembers. “I actually … I remember being in my study and I wept.”
And then came the part where he found out what happened to all those people when they grew up: “very dramatic increases in pretty much every one of the major public health problems that we’d included in the study,” he says.
Cancer, addiction, diabetes and stroke (just to name a few) occurred more often among people with high ACE scores.
Now, not everyone who’d had a rough childhood developed a serious illness, of course.
But, according to the findings, adults who had four or more “yeses” to the ACE questions were, in general, twice as likely to have heart disease, compared to people whose ACE score was zero. Women with five or more “yeses” were at least four times as likely to have depression as those with no ACE points.
When ACEs Are Very High
Carol Redding, one of Felitti’s patients, answered yes to every single ACE question, and she ended up with an ACE score of 10. Ten out of 10.
Today Redding lives in a tidy, peaceful house outside San Diego. The walls of her home office are lined with degrees and certificates — at age 58, she’s working on a Ph.D. From the outside, she’s a success.
But inside — in her body as well as her mind, Redding says — she has been battling all her life.
She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result of those childhood experiences. “I had the flashbacks,” she says, “the depression, the anxiety — Oh, my lord! Anxiety, like … if it were a tangible thing living in the house with me, I’d need another room just to house that.”
In childhood, she was diagnosed with high blood pressure. In adulthood, she had a thyroid condition and has survived three different types of cancer: leukemia, breast cancer and lymphoma.
Learning about the ACE study and her own results made Redding wonder if all of that — maybe even the cancer — might be partly connected to her troubled childhood. After so many years, all of a sudden, “all those very confused, very scattered puzzle pieces of my life just locked together in one big, amazingly clear picture,” she says.
This revelation meant so much to Redding that she started a newsletter about the ACE study and later worked for the CDC, publicizing the study’s results.
And she did all that because one big question kept nagging at her: Why didn’t more people know about this research?
Medical Community Initially Skeptical
Anda says that when he and Felitti first published their results in the late 1990s, the response from the medical community was frustrating.
“I thought that people would flock to this information,” Anda says, “and be knocking on our doors, saying, ‘Tell us more. We want to use it.’ And the initial reaction was really — silence.”
In fact, it took a long time to even get the study published. A number of top medical journals rejected the article, Anda says, “because there was intense skepticism.”
Sarah Floud, an epidemiologist at Oxford University in England, says she understands that skepticism and thinks it may still be warranted.
“An association doesn’t necessarily mean that one thing causes the other thing,” says Floud. She thinks doctors and patients should take care not to overinterpret an ACE score — it’s not a crystal ball that predicts health or illness.
Rather, Floud says, this rough indicator of a difficult childhood is just one risk factor in the mix with lots of others, such as your genes, your diet, whether you drink heavily or smoke, for example — factors known to be strongly related to some illnesses, like heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
So if you’re otherwise healthy, not a smoker or a drinker, and not obese, can childhood trauma alone increase the likelihood of diseases like cancer and heart disease?
“I don’t think there’s quite so much evidence for that,” Floud says. “But that’s not to say that it might not be true. It’s just that … that seems to be harder to prove.”
Now, 15 years after the ACE study came out, some scientists are trying to connect the dots — to get a clearer picture of what exactly adverse childhood experiences do to the body and why the study results came out the way they did.
“Well, you’ve reshaped the biology of the child,” says Megan Gunnar, a developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota who, for more than 30 years, has been studying the ways children respond to stressful experiences. “This is how nature protects us,” Gunnar adds. We all become adapted to living in “the kinds of environments we’re born into.”
And if you have scary, traumatic experiences when you’re small, Gunnar says, your stress response system may, in some cases, be programmed to overreact, influencing the way your mind and body work together. Research in animals and people suggests that the part of the mind that scientists call “executive function” — thought, judgment, self-control — seems to be most affected, she says.
“Over time, especially when you’re young, experiences of neglect and abuse and stress impair those circuits,” Gunnar says. “You’re less able to tell yourself not to eat the ice cream, or smoke the cigarette, or have that additional drink. You’re less capable of regulating your own behavior. And that seems to be terribly important for linking early experiences with later health outcomes.”
This growing body of research indicates that, right now, the health of millions of children is being shaped by abuse and neglect. As they grow up, these children will be more likely than other children to use behaviors like smoking, drinking and overeating to cope with stress.
Preventing childhood trauma in the first place, Felitti, Anda and their proponents now believe, is one of the biggest opportunities to prevent disease — and save billions in health care costs. It’s an opportunity, they say, that American medicine and the health care industry still seem to be missing.
This story is part of the NPR series, What Shapes Health?The series explores social and environmental factors that affect health throughout life. It is inspired, in part, by findings in a poll released Monday by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The contagious though that could kill you is by David Robson for BBC.com
“To die, sometimes you need only believe you are ill, and as David Robson discovers, we can unwittingly ‘catch’ such fears, often with terrifying consequences.
Beware the scaremongers. Like a witch doctor’s spell, their words might be spreading modern plagues.
We have long known that expectations of a malady can be as dangerous as a virus. In the same way that voodoo shamans could harm their victims through the power of suggestion, priming someone to think they are ill can often produce the actual symptoms of a disease. Vomiting, dizziness, headaches, and even death, could be triggered through belief alone. It’s called the “nocebo effect”.
But it is now becoming clear just how easily those dangerous beliefs can spread through gossip and hearsay – with potent effect. It may be the reason why certain houses seem cursed with illness, and why people living near wind turbines report puzzling outbreaks of dizziness, insomnia and vomiting. If you have ever felt “fluey” after a vaccination, believed your cell phone was giving you a headache, or suffered an inexplicable food allergy, you may have also fallen victim to a nocebo jinx. “The nocebo effect shows the brain’s power,” says Dimos Mitsikostas, from Athens Naval Hospital in Greece. “And we cannot fully explain it.”
A killer joke
Doctors have long known that beliefs can be deadly – as demonstrated by a rather nasty student prank that went horribly wrong. The 18th Century Viennese medic, Erich Menninger von Lerchenthal, describes how students at his medical school picked on a much-disliked assistant. Planning to teach him a lesson, they sprung upon him before announcing that he was about to be decapitated. Blindfolding him, they bowed his head onto the chopping block, before dropping a wet cloth on his neck. Convinced it was the kiss of a steel blade, the poor man “died on the spot”
Essential oils are very popular these days. They are believed to do everything from boosting the immune system to reducing anxiety to getting rid of acne. In fact, there is an oil for just about anything you want to do with the possible exception of creating world peace. But how much scientific evidence is there to support these claims? I decided to do some experiments myself. I cannot do experiments to determine whether or not essential oils really cure the flu or improve blood pressure. However, I can tell you whether or not they really kill bacteria. (I cannot test for viruses.)
If you would like to be alerted when new experimental results are posted, please like the Essential Oil Experiments Facebook Page that I made. I’ll post on there anytime I put new results up here.
If you are new to my website, let me tell you a little about myself. My name is Annie Pryor. I have a Ph.D. in biochemistry from The Ohio State University. After a few years working in a research lab, I “retired” to be a stay-at-home mom. When my first baby got a terrible stomach virus that required a trip to the ER, I decided to research the subject and created this website dedicated to reducing the prevalence of the stomach “flu” in the world. I still get a hankering to do experiments now and then. I’ve tested hand sanitizers, cleaning products, produce washing techniques and even lunch box coldness. I don’t as of yet use essential oils myself, and I don’t sell essential oils. I am not an oil expert, and I always thought they probably didn’t do anything (until getting these experimental results).
DISCLAIMER
My research is not supported or affiliated with ANY of the essential oil companies. In fact, they are all pretty mad that I am doing it. The FDA would like you to all know that Essential Oils are not allowed to claim that they treat or cure any diseases or conditions. I am in no way implying that essential oils “Stop the Stomach Flu” because that is the name of my website. I do not use or sell essential oils. I am not a medical doctor and nothing I say should be taken as medical advice. Always follow the manufacturers directions when using essential oils, cleaners, hand sanitizers, and any other product in the world. And don’t let children play with plastic bags or get near the hot stove. Got it?
Most of these are simple experiments and you can repeat them yourself if your child needs a great science fair project. In fact, there are even child sized disposable latex-free gloves called Glovies that you can buy so your kids can do most of the work with their science fair project. Those glovies are also super useful for crafts and other messy kid projects as well. You can also buy the same ready-to-use agar plates that I use on amazon. I describe my homemade incubator on the page about hand sanitizer experiments.
Does Thieves oil kill bacteria?
The first essential oil that I have tested is Thieves Oil made by Young Living. Thieves oil is a blend of clove flower bud oil, lemon rind oil, cinnamon bark oil, eucalyptus radiata leaf oil, and rosemary leaf oil. I purchased the oil from http://www.striveforhealthy.com/. (Do not buy any Young Living Oils on amazon. Young living sellers are not allowed to sell on amazon so most of the Young Living oils on there are counterfeit.) Thieves oil is said to boost the immune system and kill germs. It smells heavenly, sort of like a gingerbread house at Christmas.
The first thing I did was determine whether or not there was any bacteria in the thieves oil or olive oil that I was using. To do this I put some of the oil on a sterile swab and rubbed it all over an agar plate. I purchase all my agar plates from amazon. I let the plates incubate overnight in my 98 degree F incubator. As you can see, nothing grew on the oil plates so there is no bacteria in the oils.
For the big experiment, I tested thieves oil with other oils and cleaners to compare. I tested olive oil, coconut oil, smart balance oil, white vinegar, apple cider vinegar, and chlorine bleach. Since thieves is recommended to be used in a 1:4 dilution with a carrier oil, I also tested the mixture of thieves and olive oil. (I put 1 teaspoon of thieves oil in a bottle with 4 teaspoons of olive oil.) First, I thoroughly cleaned my kitchen countertop. Then, I used masking tape to section off squares of my kitchen island. I labeled the squares according to what I would put in each square. (Dirty +control, Clean-control, olive oil, thieves oil, smart balance oil, coconut oil, olive oil and thieves oil mixture, 10% chlorine bleach, 25% white vinegar, pure white vinegar, apple cider vinegar)
Next, I made “germ water”. To do this I got a scoop of dirt from outside and put it in a small cup of water. I poured the mixture through paper towel to get rid of chunks. Then I scrapped off some bacteria from the previous days dirty control agar plate and mixed that into the brown water. Here is the picture of the germ water. It is full of dirt and bacteria.
I put 1.25 milliliters of “germ water” onto each square and spread it around to cover the entire square using my gloved hand. Then I let the squares dry for about 2 hours.
Once the squares were dry, I put 1/4 teaspoon of each test product onto its respective square and used a clean gloved finger to spread them around to completely cover the square. Of course, I put on a new glove for each test product.
I intended to let each “cleaner” sit for 5 minutes on its square. However, I did so many different ones at once that it took too long. Each cleaner sat for 25 minutes. After 25 minutes, I used sterile swabs to collect bacteria from each square and rubbed the swabs all around on the appropriately labeled agar plate. I let the plates incubate for 36 hours in my warm incubator (about 98 degrees F).
RESULTS
This picture shows tons of bacteria growing on the dirty control plate. You also see the clean control plate which should have no bacteria. The 10% bleach plate should also have no bacteria. The apple cider vinegar, 25% white vinegar, and pure white vinegar did not have as much bacteria as the dirty control plate but still have too much bacteria for me to think they are an adequate germ-killing cleaning product. (I do always use white vinegar to clean my fake wood floors, though. It is certainly good enough for that.)
Since the Apple Cider Vinegar contains the “mother”, I wanted to make sure that the apple cider vinegar itself did not contain a lot of bacteria that grew on the agar plate. So, I just tested some apple cider vinegar by itself. There was only one colony on the plate, so no significant amounts of bacteria came from the apple cider vinegar.
This picture shows that the smart balance oil, olive oil, and coconut oil all have less bacteria than the dirty control plate and probably have some bacteria killing ability. Look at the Thieves oil plate! Not one colony of bacteria!
This picture shows the Thieves oil compared to the Thieves oil/ olive oil 1:4 mixture. The diluted thieves oil is not as good at killing bacteria as the pure thieves but it does some killing.
I have repeated this experiment several times already and have gotten the same results. Here are some results from another day. The thieves still did great as did the 3% hydrogen peroxide and Zylast Antiseptic hand sanitizer. Zylast is one of my 3 favorite hand sanitizers for killing norovirus. For a complete list, see the hand sanitizer page.
At first I wondered if the oils were really KILLING the bacteria. What if they were just coating the bacteria so that they couldn’t multiply on an agar plate? What if when you swallowed one, your stomach acid would free the bacteria from its oily prison and it could still make you sick? How do I know that it is really dead? I know that the bacteria on the hydrogen peroxide plate are really dead because the hydrogen peroxide turns into oxygen and water and is really GONE. However, since the Thieves seems to do significantly better than the olive oil, coconut oil, and Smart Balance oil, I really think it is actually KILLING the bacteria. I wouldn’t be surprised if Olive Oil was killing the some bacteria too. Here is an article about olive oil killing cancer cells.
I repeated the experiment again and this time only left the oil sit on the squares for 5 minutes. As you can see, there is just a little bit of growth on the pure thieves plate. I repeated this 5 minute experiment 4 times with the same results. There is just a little bit of growth after 5 minutes. However, time is not the ONLY variable in these experiments. The “germ water” is different every time. It may have different amounts of dirt and different amounts of bacteria from experiment to experiment. So, it may be that sometimes, if there is just too much dirt or bacteria, there will be a little bit alive after treatment with thieves. However, since I’ve repeated this several times, I do think that time plays a role. The thieves seems to do better the longer it sits. I think this is actually a GOOD result. It suggests that the killing is time dependent. This is more evidence that the oil is actually killing the bacteria. If it was just coating the bacteria and stopping it from multiplying, then I wouldn’t think the time difference would matter.
5 minute test
5 minute test
Does Thieves oil work as a hand sanitizer?
A lot of people are diluting thieves oil and are using it as a hand sanitizer. The suggested dilution is 1 drop of thieves oil and 4 drops of a carrier oil. So, I used my thieves oil/olive oil mixture that is in a spray bottle, and I used my 10 year old son’s hands. I used these amber spray bottles from amazon. I was so surprised that they could spray thick oil nicely without clogging. I did the experiments after school before my son washed hands. It would have been nice if he had 4 hands because I wanted to test 4 things. Since he didn’t, I divided up the fingers. I rubbed his thumbs on the dirty control plate. I put olive oil on the first 3 fingers of his right hand. I put the thieves/olive oil combo on the first 3 fingers of his left hand. I put Clorox Hand Sanitizer on both pinkie fingers. I let the sanitizer/oil sit on his fingers for 1 minute, and then rubbed those fingers on the appropriate agar plate. A hand sanitizer needs to work fast because you don’t have much time between putting it on your hands and picking up your sandwich. As you can see, the oils do really seem to kill some germs. However, it doesn’t compare in bacteria killing to the Clorox Hand Sanitizer. I like Clorox Hand Sanitizer because it is one of the few hand sanitizers that actually kill norovirus. (For a list of all my favorite hand sanitizers that kill norovirus, please read this page of my website.) If you aren’t going to kill stomach viruses, I see no reason to use a hand sanitizer at all. Clorox hand sanitizer is not available in stores but is available here on amazon.
I have repeated this experiment several times and am very confident in the results. Here are the results from another day. This time, I just put the thieves/olive oil combo on the left hand and the Clorox Hand Sanitizer on the right. There were only 2 colonies of bacteria on the Clorox hand and significantly more on the thieves/olive oil hand. Clorox Hand Sanitizer does not contain chlorine bleach, by the way.
Comparing Young Living Thieves Waterless Hand Purifier to Zylast antiseptic hand sanitizer
Let me first say that a good thorough hand washing with soap and water is ideal. However, there are times when me must eat but can’t get to a sink to wash hands. For example, my children are not permitted to wash hands before lunch at school. Some teachers claim that hand washing takes too much time. I think that is ridiculous, of course. However, there are times when you need a good hand sanitizer and I’ve been trying to find the best ones. I have already tested many hand sanitizers on this page.
For this experiment, I wanted to determine if the Thieves Waterless Hand Purifier really killed bacteria. I got the Thieves Waterless Hand Sanitizer here. For this experiment, I used my children’s hands and some of their friend’s hands. First they rubbed their thumbs all over the dirty control plate. Using a disposable 1mL syringe, I put .5mL of Thieves Waterless Hand Purifier onto their left fingers and rubbed it in with my clean gloved hand. I let the fingers dry for 1 minute, and then they rubbed their fingers all over the agar plate. Finally, I put .5mL of Zylast antiseptic hand sanitizer onto their right fingers. I rubbed it in with my clean gloved hand. I let it dry for 1 minute and then they rubbed those fingers all around an agar plate. I put the plates in my warm incubator for 24 hours to let the bacteria grow.
As you can see, the Thieves Waterless Hand Purifier did a very good job! It is important to note that these hands did not have ACTUAL DIRT on them. As you will see when you keep reading, most hand sanitizers ( except Zylast) don’t work well on hands with actual dirt. So, if you or your child’s hands are actually dirty, you need to wipe them off with a wipe before using the Thieves Hand Purifier.
Comparing Homemade Thieves/Witch Hazel Spray with Clorox Hand Sanitizer Spray
For this experiment, I made my own Thieves hand sanitizer. I used 15 drops of Young Living Thieves oil, 1 teaspoon Witch Hazel, and 5 teaspoons of distilled water. I put it in this amber glass spray bottle. Since it is a spray, I compared it to the Clorox Hand Sanitizer Spray that I purchased from Amazon. (The Clorox Hand Sanitizer Spray is primarily ethanol and does not contain chlorine bleach.) For this experiment, I had the kids rub their thumbs all over the dirty control plate. Next, I sprayed 8 sprays of the homemade thieves spray all on their left fingers, and I rubbed it in with my clean gloved hand. I let it sit for 1 minute, and then the kids rubbed those fingers all over the agar plate. Finally, I sprayed 5 sprays of the Clorox hand sanitizer all over the right fingers. I only used 5 sprays because that seemed to make the fingers wet enough. I rubbed it in with my clean gloved hands and let it sit for 1 minute. Then I had the kids rub their right fingers all over another plate. I incubated the plates for 24 hours in my warm incubator to let bacteria grow.
As you can see, the homemade thieves spray killed some germs but I don’t think it does enough to be actually used as a hand sanitizer. I wouldn’t trust it. It is also important to note, that these hands all looked clean. They did not have actual dirt on them. As you will see when you keep reading, most hand sanitizers (except Zylast) don’t work well on hands covered in actual dirt.
How does the Thieves Waterless Hand Purifier and the Homemade Thieves spray do in the presence of dirt?
I have done many hand sanitizer experiments in the past (which you can see here) that show that most alcohol based hand sanitizers don’t do well on hands with actual dirt on them. The alcohol just can’t seem to penetrate the dirt. I wanted to know how the Thieves Waterless Hand Purifier and the homemade Thieves Spray do when actual dirt is present. Normally, I would send my children outside to play and then they would come in with dirty hands. However, since there is 6 inches of snow on the ground and the temperature is below zero, this is not an option. So, I tested the hand sanitizers on the dirty countertop, just like I did for the first experiments on this page. I put 1.25 mL of dirty “germ water” on each square, rubbed it all around and let it dry. Then using disposable 1mL syringes, I added .5mL of each hand sanitizer to the appropriate square. I rubbed them all around with a clean gloved hand. I timed them each for 1 minute and then took swabs of the squares. I rubbed the swabs all around the appropriately labeled agar plate. The plates incubated for 24 hours.
As I expected, only the Zylast Antispetic hand sanitizer was able to cut through the dirt. Don’t feel too bad, Thieves lovers. Purell Advanced and the Clorox Hand Sanitizer do not do well in this test either. My advice is that if you use any hand sanitizer besides Zylast antiseptic, wipe dirt off your hands with a wipe before using your hand sanitizer.
To sum up, I am surprised and impressed with how well the Thieves Waterless Hand Purifier killed bacteria in my experiments. We don’t know if it would kill norovirus, though. It is also important to wipe off your hands with a wet wipe before using the hand purifier if you have visible dirt on your hands. The Thieves Hand Purifier also smells WONDERFUL. It smells like peppermint and smells so delicious that you need to be careful that your kids don’t eat it. If you would like to buy Thieves Hand Purifier, you can order it from www.striveforhealthy.com or buy it from another authorized Young Living seller. Do not buy it from Amazon. Many Young Living Products on Amazon are counterfeit.
Clorox Hand Sanitizer Spray has always been a favorite of mine because it is one of the few tested to kill norovirus. It is primarily ethanol and does not contain any chlorine bleach. It dries nicely leaving your hands feeling clean. It is important to wipe off your hands with a wipe before using this hand sanitizer if they are visibly dirty. Clorox Hand Sanitizer is available from a reputable seller on amazon. Of course, I LOVE the “Norophobe Zone” magnet that this pack of hand sanitizer comes with.
Zylast antiseptic is a wonderful product! It kills norovirus and works on dirty hands! Sometimes people complain that it leaves a sticky film. You can order it from http://www.zylastdirect.com/catalog.php. If you use the coupon code “StopNorovirus” you will get 10% off your order. I recommend getting Zylast Antiseptic and NOT Zylast Lotion. The lotion has never been tested for its ability to kill norovirus.
FUTURE EXPERIMENTS
I currently working on testing Ameo Proshield and doTERRA ON Guard to see how they compare with Young Living Thieves. I will also be testing the thieves cleaner. I have a big list of experiments that people want to see. So, check back soon for more results. Also, If you would like to be alerted when new experimental results are posted, please like the Essential Oil Experiments Facebook Page that I made. I’ll post on there anytime I put new results up. Feel free to e-mail me if you have suggestions.
These experiments are very expensive to do. I have spent over $200 on agar plates for just the experiments that I have done on this page so far. I have received $100 in donations which I greatly appreciate. If you happen to be able to make a small donation to these experiments, I would really appreciate it. Most people donate $5. However, please do not donate if you can’t easily afford it. I’ll find a way to do them anyway. I asked my husband for agar plates for Valentines Day.
I am not an essential oil expert. If you have questions about the oils or want to learn more about them, you can e-mail the gal at www.striveforhealthy.com. This is where I bought mine. I got very good customer service and she is very knowledgable.
Please do me a favor before you leave my site. Please read this one page about how to avoid getting and spreading stomach bugs. My main mission is to reduce the prevalence of stomach bugs in the world. That can only be accomplished through education. Please read the page. Don’t be the person who sends your kids back to school because they haven’t vomited in a few hours. Don’t be the person who bakes cupcakes for your child’s class the day after you had a stomach virus. Thank you!
Your nose isn’t the only part of your body capable of taking a whiff.
In the past decade, scientists have discovered olfactory receptors lingering in strange places—in sperm, in the spine, and even in the kidneys. Now researchers in Hanns Hatt’s lab at Germany’s Ruhr University Bochum have identified scent receptors somewhere much more accessible: the skin. What’s more, these receptors appear to be involved in healing.
They found that Sandalore—a synthetic sandalwood oil used in aromatherapy, perfumes and skin care products—bound to an olfactory receptor in skin called OR2AT4. Rather than sending a message to the brain, as nose receptors do, the receptor triggered cells to divide and migrate, important processes in repairing damaged skin.
Cell proliferation increased by 32 per cent and cell migration by nearly half when keratinocytes [skin cells] in a test tube and in culture were mixed for five days with Sandalore.
In other words, your skin has the ability to smell, just not in the way we normally think of. Instead, certain odorants target “smelling” receptors in the skin, which prompt the healing process. Of course, just as one nose is different from another, so are the scent receptors in our skin. One person’s genetics might predispose them to greater olfactory sensitivity than another’s.
This discovery is another example of our skin’s unexpected abilities. This week, NOVA Next contributor Sujata Gupta reported on the skin’s ability to “hear” sound. And new findings about our sense of touch, too, have illuminated a possible sensory-social dimension of autism. In the future, we might see a growing number of treatments channeled through the skin, whether they are topical solutions or otherwise.
This article is worth reading– especially between the lines. First of all– The Wall Street Journal is focusing on a complimentary and alternative medicine technology. You don’t need to be a psychic to predict that they find a way to marginalize it. Indeed they do by pointing out that one study was “company financed.” I have no problem with that per se but they almost never point out that Big Pharma companies routinely finance their own studies. So, cutting through the anti-CAM wacka wacka wacka, the most relevant copy in the article is here. “Grounding was tested by Penn State researchers in a study of about 20 infants hospitalized after birth in the intensive-care unit….The improved vagal-nerve activity—which a previous study linked to reduced risk of an inflammatory bowel disease common to newborns—disappeared when the electrode was removed, says Charles Palmer, a study co-investigator with no financial connection to Earth FX.”
Oh! Just the vagus nerve! One of the most crucial nerves in the body. From Wickipedia: “This means that the vagus nerve is responsible for such varied tasks as heart rate, gastrointestinal peristalsis, sweating, and quite a few muscle movements in the mouth, including speech (via the recurrent laryngeal nerve) and keeping the larynx open for breathing (via action of the posterior cricoarytenoid muscle, the only abductor of the vocal folds).”
Maybe there really is something to this after all…ya think?
Unfortunately Earth FX does not message the technology as well as it good. Plain and simple– it is an electron transfer technology and it addresses the human system from a bio-physics perspective. It is cleaner and clearer than ingesting synthetic chemicals that long term lower the immune system. The human body is electrical and we would do much better to address the human system on that level than to be chasing symptoms with Big Pharma.
Will Getting Grounded Help You Sleep Better and Ease Pain?
By Laura Johannes
The Claim: Our bodies receive a charge of energy from the Earth when we walk barefoot outdoors, according to companies that sell products designed to give users the same effect. The process, sometimes called “earthing,” improves sleep, eases chronic pain and imparts a sense of well being, companies say.
Earth FX’s half sheet plugs into a socket or connects to a rod in the ground. F. Martin Ramin/The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas
The Verdict: There is little credible proof of health benefits, scientists say. Several studies show connecting subjects to an electrical ground changes bodily measurements, such as a marker of central-nervous system activity in infants. But the studies are “preliminary at best,” poorly designed and too small to be meaningful, says Steven Novella, a clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn., and executive editor of the blog Science-Based Medicine, which looks at controversies in science and medicine.
By living indoors and wearing shoes, “we have accidentally disconnected from the Earth,” says Clint Ober, founder and president of Earth FX Inc., Palm Springs, Calif. The company’s products, such as a fitted sheet for $180 and a $140 half sheet, are woven with conductive silver and are typically plugged into the ground, or third, socket, of wall outlets.
The Pluggz line of shoes, including $39 flip-flops and women’s shoes starting at $109, have circles in the sole infused with a carbon powder that conducts electrons from the Earth, says Sharon Whiteley, chief executive of Listen Brands Inc. in Tucson, Ariz.
John Cohn, a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a New York professional society, says it’s true that coming into contact with the Earth can cause the body to pick up electrons. Dr. Cohn and other scientists also say that plugging a conductive item, such as a sheet, into the third hole of a wall socket will have the same result, since it is connected to the ground.
Pluggz flip-flops have circles in the soles that are infused with carbon powder to help conduct electrons from the Earth Listen Brands LLC
But Dr. Cohn and others say the energy exchange isn’t an unusual event. The body gains and loses electrons all day routinely, says Chad Orzel, chairman of the department of physics and astronomy at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and nothing makes the Earth’s electrons special. “Every electron is identical to every other electron in the universe,” he says. Moreover, say Dr. Cohn and Dr. Orzel, any electrons picked up will remain mostly on the skin—making a positive health effect seem unlikely.
Advocates of earthing’s positive benefits point to a company-financed, eight-person study that found decreases in post-exercise muscle pain in subjects who spent evenings and nights grounded.
Grounding was tested by Penn State researchers in a study of about 20 infants hospitalized after birth in the intensive-care unit. The study was presented as a poster presentation at a meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies earlier this month in Vancouver, British Columbia. When the babies were grounded using an electrode on their legs plugged into a grounding socket, scientists measured improved activity of the vagal nerve, which is involved in the body’s relaxation response.
The improved vagal-nerve activity—which a previous study linked to reduced risk of an inflammatory bowel disease common to newborns—disappeared when the electrode was removed, says Charles Palmer, a study co-investigator with no financial connection to Earth FX. The result is “very intriguing” but needs to be replicated by other scientists, says Dr. Palmer, chief of newborn medicine at Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital in Hershey, Pa.
This is a fantastic article on the science of sleep and has some inteteresting implications for Cranio Sacral therapy and its work with the Cerebral Spinal Fluid.
We know we need to sleep. We know our brains and bodies work better after sleep. But what we didn’t know, until now, was why.
Scientists have just reported the first major mechanical reason our brains need to sleep — certain cleaning mechanisms in the brain work better when we shut the brain down. Just like how dump trucks take to the city streets during the pre-dawn hours because there’s less traffic, our brain’s cleaners also work best when there’s less going on.
“This study shows that the brain has different functional states when asleep and when awake,” study researcher Maiken Nedergaard, of the University of Rochester said in a statement. “In fact, the restorative nature of sleep appears to be the result of the active clearance of the by-products of neural activity that accumulate during wakefulness.”
We’ve known that our brains consolidate memories during sleep and perform other important functions. There are also benefits to the body during sleep — resting allows our muscles, bones, and organs to repair themselves. It also keeps our immune system healthy.
We know that sleep has all of these benefits, but until now we didn’t know any of the specific changes that bring about these sleep benefits.
Charles Czeisler, a sleep researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston, told Science Magazine’s Emily Underwood that this is the “first direct experimental evidence at the molecular level” for why we need to sleep.
All of our cells accumulate waste while they are working, and these waste products can be toxic. If they aren’t removed they can build up and kill our cells. Throughout the rest of the body the lymphatic system washes these waste products away, but the brain is cut off from these actions because of the blood-brain barrier.
J. Iliff and M. Nedergaard, STM, 2012
The purple areas are the channels through which brain fluid flows, and the green areas are the glial cells that control the flow of fluid through them.
The team just discovered the brain’s unique trash disposal system last year — the find was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine on Aug. 15, 2012. It works like a plumbing system.
The brain itself is bathed in a special clear liquid called cerebrospinal fluid, which doesn’t mix with the blood and lymph system of the rest of the body. In the study from last year, they found that this fluid travels through special channels and washes the brain out.
There are two types of cells in the brain — the neurons that send signals and the glial that keep them healthy. They found that these glial cells seem to create these cleaning channels around the neurons.
It washes away toxic proteins and removes them from the brain’s circulatory system. They are transferred to the general circulatory system, where the liver can remove them.
Sleeping mice
Xie, et. al, Science, 2013.
When mice sleep, fluid-filled channels (pale blue) between neurons expand and flush out waste.
By studying this newfound pathway in mice trained to sleep on a microscope, the researchers found that this system was 10 times more active during sleep than it was while the mice were awake.
They injected the mice with colored toxic proteins to see the system at work — when the mice were sleeping, these toxic proteins were removed from the brain twice as quickly as when they were awake.
In the new study, they found that while the brain is sleeping, the neurons shrink by about 60% and the channels between these cells grow and fill with fluid. The glial cells then activate their pumping system to push the brain’s cerebrospinal fluid through these extra spaces and flush out the area around the neurons.
When we wake, these channels squeeze shut again as the cells plump up, and the cerebrospinal fluid is once again found mostly around the surface of the brain, not deep inside it. While awake, this washing process acts at only about 5% of its performance during sleep.
All of this fluid movement is energy intensive, which is why the researchers think it can only happen effectively during sleep. Normally, all of our brain’s energy is busy doing normal brain activities that support every thing we do — all of our movements, our thoughts, creating memories, and analyzing the signals that come in through our senses. By shutting these processes down, our brains are able to switch into cleaning mode.
Understanding sleep
The toxins that this pathway removes are the kind responsible for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Understanding this pathway not only helps us understand our need for sleep, and possibly control it better with drugs that turn it on and off, but could also lead to new ways to treat and prevent these diseases.
The buildup of toxic waste proteins causes brain cells to die in Alzheimer’s disease.
In a Perspectives article in Science Magazine about the study, Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a brain researcher at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, even suggested that this build up of toxins is what turns on our need to sleep and makes us sleepy.
The mice in the study were woken up after 60 minutes of sleep, so we don’t yet know how the amount or kind of sleep humans get affects the washing process.
While it sounds counter-intuitive, this could even explain why some small-brained animals need more sleep than large-brained animals. For example, bats sleep up to 20 hours a day, while elephants sleep four. Why? Because bigger brains have more space to store these toxins before they build up to dangerous levels and need to be flushed.
Understanding how “brain structure and function changes in the two different states (sleep-wake) suggests that we can start to think about how we can manipulate the two states,” Nedergaard told Business Insider in an email. Manipulations could include ways to put this cleaning system into “hyperdrive” so we could sleep less, but that’s way in the future.
So this is pretty interesting…I suspect that many species on this planet hold keys for us and that we routinely overlook them because we are too enamored with our own technological wanks…
Portuguese designer Susana Soares has developed a device for detecting cancer and other serious diseases using trained bees. The bees are placed in a glass chamber into which the patient exhales; the bees fly into a smaller secondary chamber if they detect cancer.
Scientists have found that honey bees – Apis mellifera – have an extraordinary sense of smell that is more acute than that of a sniffer dog and can detect airborne molecules in the parts-per-trillion range.
Bees can be trained to detect specific chemical odours, including the biomarkers associated with diseases such as tuberculosis, lung, skin and pancreatic cancer.
