Essential oils have a role to play in preventing ill health
and disease — always the best option– or encouraging our bodies to heal and recover faster if disease has set in.

Antibiotics have become less effective in recent years leading to fears that hospital operations may be affected or prevented due to the existence of bugs which can resist the strongest of antibiotics we now have.

There are on record some strains of bacteria which are completely resistant to all known antibiotics, meaning that the usual relied-upon medical treatment for patients who contract diseases caused by those bacteria won’t work. We have relied on antibiotics for so long and so heavily that we have forgotten earlier solutions and not developed new ones.

In the plant kingdom, living plants have developed the ability to produce chemicals within the plant which can help that individual plant to withstand attacks from insects, different kinds of fungus, bacteria and virus attacks.

Some of these uses have been known and used by our grandmothers, by traditional medical herbalists and healers down through the ages. Many of them have fallen out of use and even out of living memory in some cases.

To give some examples, from the neighbouring country of France a friend who grew up in Paris, told me how his mother treated colds; whenever he began to catch a cold, his mother cut a slice of bread, buttered it, spread it with finely chopped, raw garlic and gave it to him to eat. That was it.

A bit further south in Provence, another child told how when the winter season came and colds and flu were going around, if he was sick in bed, his mother would put a pot of water on the back of the stove, load it up with lavender and rosemary and let the beautifully scented vapour diffuse through the whole house. This was the traditional treatment in his part of the country.

This fragrant solutions sounds wonderfully rustic country cottage and quaint in our modern world of antiseptics and chemical sanitizers.

So, is there any scientific evidence to back up such an activity?

The skin is our first line of defence. It covers all the organs in our bodies to protect them from toxins and infections.

In the cases of burns, open wounds are a break in this protective barrier. However, they cannot be covered with bandages or coverings, leaving the layers below exposed to airborne bacteria.

Scientific studies done recently have shown that certain combinations of essential oils diffused into the atmosphere can dramatically lower the amount of infections in burn wounds.

Lavender is one such oil. It has been found lavender promotes healing while keeping wounds from developing infection. Another very effective oil is geranium oil. One of the strongest of oils is oil of oregano, the same herb we love to put on our pizzas and our Italian recipes. Perhaps the strongest essential oils is cinnamon,