Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Essential Oils

Episode Date: September 27, 2019

This week on Sawbones, we talk about the many, many things essential oils can't do for you and the dueling Utah-based companies that insist we're wrong. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out. We saw through the broken glass and had ourselves hot like a rum.

Some medicines, some medicines that escalate my cop for the mouth Hello, everybody and welcome to solvents a battle group of misguided medicine Just a macro rule And I'm Sydney McRoy Thank you Fine, I didn't even bother me anymore, my immune to it. I expect it. I'd be disappointed, but it didn't happen. Whatever.

How's it going? There's so many of you. There's so many. And the chandeliers in here are so pretty. I didn't even think about that when I was visualizing how this would go. When we were excited to find out, we were coming to Salt Lake City, and when we go on tour, I always try to find a topic that is somewhat related to where we're going. And so I started doing some research, and I found a lot of cool stuff.

The problem was, like, I found the this history of these female physicians who were really cool and influential, but on sawbones we talk about a lot of, like, stuff that went wrong or stuff people did that wasn't so great, and like, they did good stuff, and I was like, well, this doesn't, I mean, it's cool. I can't, what are we gonna do with that? And then I found out that in Utah, the first artificial heart was implanted. Cool. Very cool.

Cool job, everybody. Very cool. Yeah, I'll cheer in like you were in the room. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was touching go there for a bit. But I was still looking for something that would meet that criteria of misguided medicine. And then a lot of people were tweeting at me that we should talk about something you guys,

I think, are really into here. I hear y'all are really into essential oils. So apparently that's true. Dad, we've touched the nerve. We've talked about aromatherapy a little bit on the show before, but we haven't really followed essential oils into the modern day phenomenon that they are throughout the United States, but it seems like particularly here. Oh, yeah. So we're going to talk about them.

Yeah. Please don't be mad. So I thought this was a good quote to start with. Voltaire once said. The episode is dictionary defines oil as. The best medicines are those with a strong aroma. Sure. Well, I don't know, but it seems like people tend to believe that

because the use of oils from plants, well, the first of all, the use of plants is medicine, obviously, dates back to prehistory. So the idea of extracting an oil from that plant, of pressing it and distilling it, and getting the oil from it, isn't that big of a leap. It makes sense that people tried that. And that's, by the way, I think that's part of,

as we talk about, like, why essential oils are so popular. The word essential refers to the fact that they are the essence of the plant. That's where it comes from. It's the oil derived directly from the plant, not that they are necessarily essential for us. As humans. They've been used since ancient times, and that's not surprising. I mean, if we look back to the ancient Egyptians used all kinds of essential oils, not just for medicinal purposes, but for cosmetics, and just, you know, because they like smelling good.

They were used for embalming and cleansing, things like frankincense and sandalwood and mer cinnamon. You find biblical references to these things. It's not surprising to think that our ancestors have been using oils that smelled good for a long time. And they covered up bad smells, so that was nice. Well, of which sickness, I think, would be related to a lot, right? Sure. Yeah, yeah. You I think would be related to a lot, right? Sure.

Yeah, yeah. You smell bad. You might be sick. Have some sandalwood. They were very much connected to not just a physical well-being, but spiritual well-being. For a while, even you couldn't even get a prescription for one except from a priest in ancient Egypt. You had to find a spiritual leader who could tell you the right one so you couldn't even get a prescription for one except from a priest in ancient Egypt. You had to find a spiritual leader

who could tell you the right one so you didn't get the wrong oil for the wrong reason. Extremely dangerous. I don't know. And a lot of that is because if you look at the reasons they said that they were beneficial, they're not like direct medical claims. It's more a general sense of well-being.

They talk about how using essential oils will release you from the chains and stressors of your day. You know, just like a tension reliever. If you smell this really good stuff. Correct. That's accurate. The Greeks and the Romans, of course, had to expand upon that. It wasn't just enough for it to be like relaxing. Of course, they liked that. The Romans were very oily. They loved it. Yeah. Do we have any Romans in the house tonight? I mean, they smelled great.

I'm sure. But they like getting all oiled up for all kinds of reasons. I didn't mean that. Don't look to me for help, Smirl. It's not happening. The Greek. Take a tell, it's not my brother. My brother made this would be the next 20 minutes. The great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, the great, Hippocrates generally just said like a bath and getting oiled up is good for general health.

You should do it every day. Galen also recommended that you use oil for snake bites. Specifically, the way you use it, you could use rose oil by, let's say you have a snake bite on your arm. Ah! I, as the doctor, the practitioner would put rose oil in my mouth and then suck the poison out with that in my mouth. I saw in city slickers that part works. Neither of those things work. Don't do either.

The sucking out of the poison or the rosary. Things really progressed when Aviceno was a physician who figured out how to distill oils down properly around the year 1000, and that was when they really started to take off. One of the most famous stories about the use of oils in medicine is probably the story of thieves oil. Now, if you've heard, you may have heard this before, and the thing about it is that nobody really knows if any of this is true. It's gone from any kind of like actual account of events into a mythological realm. So this may or may not have happened,

but this is where we think this oil, this particular oil mixture may have come from, and it dates back to the plague. In the 14th century, everybody was dealing with the plague. And because a lot of people were dying, and they were dying, and maybe didn't expect to die, and so they had their goods on them, like their money and their belongings. There were thieves who would go into the houses and steal stuff off of bodies after people die. How bad was this plague?

He'd be like, oh, what the? Oh, man. Oh, man, I'm dying of the plague. I had a lot to do to do. Out done. They thought they were going to be OK because they were, be okay because the plague doctors were showing up in their plague doctor costumes with their big beaks and their popery.

They were strapping live chickens to them. Which always works. So they thought they'd be fine. But they weren't. And so there was a band of thieves who would come after the plague had ravaged a house and just steal everything. So bad guys. And so there was a band of thieves who would come after the plague had ravaged a house and just steal everything.

So bad guys. But they weren't dying from the plague. And after they were finally captured in Marseille, the question that everybody had was, how did you go in and be around so many people who had died of the plague and not get the plague? You should be dead. And there's even an account that maybe in exchange for their secret, they were set free, although I don't know that that was necessarily true, but they may have just given their secret and then been killed anyway.

Either way, they shared that there was a specific blend of oils and spices. Like the kernel. They're 11 secret herbs and spices. No, there was a secret blend that they used. And as to why they used this, there are some accounts that they knew and apothecary who told them to use it. There are some accounts that they also like secretly traded spices and so they just happened to have them all over themselves. Either way, they said, we always have this on us and this is why we don't get the plague.

And this story led to thieves oil, which at the time was a recipe of clove, lemon, cinnamon, eucalyptus, and rosemary, since then it's been reinvented multiple different ways and it has persisted to present day. I mean you will find thieves oil recipes that you can blend at home or that you can buy from the big essential oil dealers. It's one of the most popular for... That's the same thing to do folks. Don't try to make your own. You're all the

messin' up. Trust the experts. Sure. The expert, yeah. So that's probably the most famous use and that perpetuated and gave this idea that certain oils would not only like help with general well-being but they could actually stave off illness, protect you from sickness, and from then it just took off that they could be used for all kinds of healing. Things really stepped up in the 1900s with a French chemist, a René Maurice, you can say his lesson. Godday false.

It says Smith. Godday false. Godday false. Anyway, Renee, no man, his ghost probably got so stoked for a second, I gotta go and say, it's like Gattle Fossy, maybe. Gattle Fossy? Gattle Fossy, sorry.

I'm about to give him a heart. I'm about to give him a heart. Sorry, ghost. So he's probably not thrilled. But he burned his hand in the lab. He never mentioned to talk about what a good dad I was. Oh, God, I want to hear this. Oh, no, it's the burn my hand in the lab thing.

He burned his hand in the lab, and he plunged it into some lavender oil, like you have in your lab laying around. I know every lab I ever worked in. We just had a big vat of lavender oil just in case. So he put his hand in the lavender oil and the burned healed really well. And the honest truth is he had the lavender oil because he was trying to disprove essential oils,

but this proved it, he thought, and he became a convert. And he began to tell everybody, like, listen, this lavender oil saved my hand. You should all use lavender oil for everything. And so from this grew a lot of what we now think of as the modern uses of essential oils from this story. This was the reinvigoration of oils since the thieves oil. Since then, there was a Dr. Jean Valne, who followed his teachings and worked in his tradition

and came up with do seem for different oils and which ones were good for different things. And this led to some of the general associations that still persist today, things like coriander, is a good afradi-j-ac, or marjoram, is a good afrodigiac or marjoram is a good sedative. You can use birch for muscle aches or cinnamon to reduce drowsiness. A lot of these things that you hear have origins back in, you know, the early 1900s from from these chemists. Now in terms of using essential oils, which I'm

guessing some of you may be familiar with from the reactions. You can smell them, that is one way. You can inhale them. You can also apply them to your skin, so like on your temples or somewhere, they'll tell you where to put them. Directions are usually on the bottle bottle is what the websites tell me. There are certain ones that you are supposed to ingest.

This is interesting because you'll find this on some of the major distributors will advise that they have special ones. All of them are very pure and perfectly distilled, but these are even more perfect. Nice. And we want you to take these internally. And the wild thing about that is even among alternative medicine practitioners, this is a very controversial claim.

There are a lot of people who are like, listen, I love oil. But I'm not telling anybody to drink it. But there are ones that they supposedly say you can ingest. I love to be a fly on the wall for that discussion, that argument. And as far as how they work, there are a lot of ideas. I mean, part of it is like the way that your body reacts to a smell, which is well known, like how our brain chemistry reacts to a smell, whether it's, you know, brings up a certain memory or leads to feelings of relaxation,

or to get a part of it. Or to get your cowed, I mean, to be anything. And then there's also this belief that it stimulates certain hormones and enzymes and it can actually change your body chemistry in different ways that we haven't traditionally connected to things that we smell. Things that happen, we have a connected to things that actually happen. At this point, not necessarily. The things we worry about, before we get into some of the modern distributors, the things

we worry about with essential oils, the number one thing is just like somebody having an allergic reaction, just a rash, which doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world, right? Now we do worry about more severe allergic responses or that it could trigger something like asthma. There have been certain certain reports, isolated cases of more severe reactions. Generally, you're not going to suffer liver damage from an essential oil.

Most people aren't drinking whole bottles of it and that kind of thing. But these are concerns. And there was even a study that was published back in 2007 that found that certain oils, like lavender oil, can act as kind of an endocrine system disruptor and can change your hormonal balance. So actually, they must do something. But in this case, it was giving some young boys

gynecomastia, so they were growing breast tissue as a result of this exposure to lavender oil. And then when they stopped it, it went away. And so there was this concern, like, well, if this is an endocrine disruptor how many others are endocrine disruptors? I don't know, nobody's doing that study to find that out. And if you look at the websites where they sell these, they tell you that while you should definitely talk to, they usually say, your health advisor, health care advisor, before you use these things,

that it's still okay for pregnant people, that it's still okay for children. You should just talk to your health care advisor first, who is very familiar with essential oils. Which would rule me out other than this podcast. What are they marketed for now? I mean, you know, everything. I mean, the popular saying is there's an oil for that.

I think that's even on t-shirts. There's an oil for that. Anything you complain about. The popular saying among people I'd like to push into a well. people I'd like to push into a well. LAUGHTER CHEERING CHEERING Sorry, we're staying fair and balanced still, everyone.

The medicines, the medicines, that ask you let my car be for the mountain. The claims range from things that seem like, well, that kind of makes sense. Like, they could help you sleep, they could help insomnia, they could help with anxiety. And you think, well, it smells really nice, that could help you relax, that kind of makes sense. To things that seem a little less likely, like, they'll cure your infection, they'll help with your thyroid problem, they'll fix your immune system, they'll fix your high cholesterol, they'll fix your asthma, they'll fix your acne, they'll cure all your burns, they'll fix your high cholesterol, they'll fix your asthma, they'll fix your acne,

they'll cure all your burns, they'll cure Alzheimer's, MS, autoimmune disease, ringworm, constipation, blackheads, and of course cancer. And that's naturally. They've always got to throw that in there. Do I get it in there? By always. The current state of research, as to all these claims, the best you could say is that it's uncertain. There are no, and it's hard, and this is true about a lot of alternative

therapy, so I always feel like you have to be fair and say this. Nobody's doing a big study. So I'm not saying we did a giant, you know, funded well-controlled study, and it showed that this did not work. They're mostly smaller studies. There's not a lot of money put into the research, because the companies that are selling them aren't regulated by the FDA. They don't necessarily have to do big studies to sell these things.

But certainly, they'd want to do the big studies to prove that these works super good, right? You would think? You know they're making cash They've got some money. I would say if you but if you're already making the cash Why don't this time they go back and do the study? You don't know but but they are hard to do studies Around because for one thing, they're not standardized. So when you buy peppermint oil from one company, it could be very different from peppermint

oil you buy from another company. And in fact, they'll tell you that. They'll say ours is the only real, pure, whatever, and they all have their own distillation process, and they'll tell you where in the world they're from. This is the only one that really works. So they'll tell you where in the world they're from. This is the only one that really works. So they'll tell you they're not standardized. So the stuff that you buy Walmart has their own starter set now. Like you're seven essential oils to get you going.

Stardigant essential oils. Yeah. But they'll tell you, those aren't as good as ours. And so how do you do a study on something if you're like, so we think that this one bottle does this. Every other bottle we have no idea about. It's also really hard to do a double blind study with an essential oil because the aroma is kind of the point.

And so if you're going to blind it and say give some people the essential oil and other people not, but they don't know, it's still got to smell people the essential oil and other people not, but they don't know. It's still got to smell like the essential oil. And so it's hard to do a study. The point is that at this point, we don't have any large studies that prove conclusively that they work really well for almost anything. There's been some evidence that is compelling for anxiety, for insomnia. They've done some studies with pain and they've shown that maybe in a cute painful episode,

something like a kidney stone, also inhaling an essential oil, might also help with like pain scores, like the patient reports, less pain. So there's been some interesting things that could use more investigation, but a lot of these are... I wish you were this diplomatic when I left the toilet seat open. You've done some interesting things with the toilet seat,

and I'm gonna keep thinking about it, and I hope there'll be a big study to see if you left it up or not. It's hard to say. I mean, it keep thinking about it, and I hope there will be a big study to see if you left it up or not. It's hard to say. I mean, it looks up, for sure. But I want to do some more research to see if the toilet seat is up, and if you do it every single day. Well, in some of the, it would be great.

I mean, like I understand the attraction. It would be great if, in some cases, it was this easy. Although to be fair, some of these essential oils are very expensive. But the ones that aren't as expensive, if they did all the things that they said they did, that would be fantastic, right? Like, right now we don't have one medicine cure-all for cancer, so it would be great if we did,

but it's not this stuff. Um. There, there have been some interesting studies done with peppermint oil affecting certain like gastrointestinal symptoms, maybe is a helpful treatment for irritable bowel syndrome. There have been some studies done with peppermint oil and headaches. They showed some maybe some positive results, but again, a lot of this stuff doesn't, it doesn't hold up to rigorous scientific scrutiny. So, I think with that in mind, we should talk about the big companies that are selling essential oils and kind of how that started. So, let's start with young living.

The origin of young living is very much tied to the late founder of the company Gary Young, who said that he had a traumatic accident. He was a logging accident and he ended up fracturing his skull and damaging his spinal cord and the doctors told him he would never walk again. And as a result of this, he started to get interested in alternative therapies and eventually, of course, he did walk again. That is the end of the story. And he, yes, and that is wonderful. And he aimed at me.

I mean, you're right. It is good that he walked again. And that was good applause, agreed. The rest of your monsters. Myself included. This led him to really start investigating alternative medicine practices and what are doctors, obviously doctors don't know everything. I mean we don't, we don't know everything. So we wanted to find other ways. No comment. So in 1983 he started out with

doing these blood tests that could detect cancer and I mean anything, like he could do these blood tests that could detect all kinds of illnesses and he got kind of busted for this because the blood test didn't necessarily work and this was found out by some undercover detectives who like they gave him a blood sample that was from a cat and the cat was, he diagnosed the cat with an aggressive cancer and liver dysfunction.

And then when they said, okay, that was actually from a cat, they were told well, the cat is definitely not healthy. And you can get that cat real quick right away. It's a seriously ill cat. And probably has leukemia. It did not. The cat was fine. Yeah.

So he got, and he got busted at the time for like practicing medicines without a license. Which is not generally something we encourage. From there he got into essential oils because he met a distillation group in a grower who were growing French lavender and distilling it and selling these essential oils and he became really interested in this and so he started buying up big acres of farmland and growing peppermint and growing lavender and tanzy and all these different things. And from there in 2000, he founded the first the Young Life Research Clinic,

which would provide all the evidence that he would eventually use for the young living, the essential oils. The initial clinic that he opened, he started out in Utah, but he got in trouble because there was a patient who got a vitamin C infusion and it caused renal failure, kidney failure and almost killed her. So he moved down to, she did not die.

He moved down to Ecuador. Nice. Happy ending. So he moved his clinic down to Ecuador and I was reading some accounts of what some of the practices there were, and some of it was just diet advice, like healthy living diet stuff, which was fine. But then there was also like essential oil, IV infusions, intravenous, which is not a known treatment for any,

and I didn't find that even among other like alternative medicine sites, the idea that you should IV frankincense. That's what it was for your cancer. That's not accepted by anybody else but that was going on. He was allegedly even like performing surgeries and again he was not a doctor. So there were a lot of concerning practices. And people within the business, within young living, were starting to be concerned about some of these things. In particular, David Sterling, who was the chief operating officer. He was also concerned about some of, there was some things about his spending,

that he didn't like, and some of kind of like the showmanship that was associated with the business. And so because of all this, the two were constantly budding heads and young eventually fired Sterling. Sterling went on to found Dotera. Good, good. Which my understanding from reading their websites is bringing essential oils to the people whereas young living was more focused on kind of this more like spiritual calling of essential oils that this was like hey here's some practical essential oil advice for you moms who just want to, I don't know, keep your kids out of the doctor's office and make your house smell better, and also maybe

sell essential oils. Because, as I'm sure you all know, they are both multi-level marketing companies. Few you've gotten party invites, I see. Now, Justin, what do you think of... This is one of my favorite things to talk about when Sidney told me we were talking about this. She told me I could have like a minute talk about multilaylor marketing. 99% of the people who do multi-level marketing lose money doing multi-level marketing that is non-exaggeration. It is the facts. Here's some quick stats by young living in Dutera. Do you hear that? Do you hear that? Do you hear that?

Do you hear that? Do you hear that? Do you hear that? Do you hear that? Do you hear that? Do you hear that? Do you hear that? Do you hear that?

Do you hear that? Do you hear that? Do you hear that? Now, that's great, except I said leaders, and leaders are the top 1% of the company. 1% make it to leaders. 99% of the people are not. 95% of the people doing duty are not making any cash at all. Now, young living, their average in 2016, the average income that a family made from selling and being part of this program, the average income for a household selling young living products, was $25.

And the median was zero. Multilover marketing is a scam. Don't let your friends do it. They won't make any money. They'll just give it up to off. And it's even worse because the people that are selling it are making money selling garbage. Anyway, sorry, stay good. So other than the concerns about the companies that are, we'll say, shaped like triangles. People say their defense is,

no, they're not a pyramid scheme, because pyramid schemes are illegal, which is like saying that I'm not a murderer because I'm not in jail. It's so stupid. Biggest MLM in America, biggest MLM in America, Amway. Head of Amway was for many, many years, the head of the Chamber of Commerce. Number one donor to the Reagan administration was, he gets the Amway. I wonder why they're not in jail.

That's weird. It's so weird that they're not in jail. All right, all right. This is not an Amway podcast. It can't be a comedy scheme. All right, all right. This is not an amway. You can't be a pocket skim. Those are illegal. We got to finish. You've got another show to do.

And these people. They will pick this up. These people need to pee. Like mid sentence. So of course, other than the concerns about multi-level marketing companies, there's a podcast called The Dream where I learned all this. Just go listen to the Dream.

It's fantastic. It's a podcast called The Dream where I learned all this. Just go listen to the dream. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's all right, go ahead. They've run into other troubles with the FDA. Some of the people, because there's so many different people selling the product, sometimes they make claims that even the companies are like, ooh, that's too far. And so they got in trouble for saying

that this can fend off Ebola. The right oil will stop Ebola. That's probably not true. The two of them, of course, had to come, had to head in a court battle, which the only thing I loved about that was one of the judges said about the two companies fighting over like, did you steal my intellectual property and all this stuff? He said, the judge said, it gave me a bit of a headache and even a stomach ache because of all the smells

of the oils during the trial. But the thing is, and there are some concerns I had. I was looking at the, from the Young Living website, and they say that if you get skin irritation from one of their products, that it's just toxins coming out of your skin. And it's not the product. And it's probably some other soap or product you used coming out. So just don't use that one.

And then they have another thing that you can dilute that they're oil with. You can buy them both, dilute it, and then put that on instead. And that obviously gives me some concerns. And then there is also the argument like this is cheaper. This is cheaper way. This is better than traditional medicine. Because it's cheaper.

One of the studies that they cite is a study that compared Tylenol or the Cedamentifin to peppermint oil for headaches. And my problem with this is that the young living peppermint oil is $24.20 for 15 milliliters, that's three teaspoons. So assuming you use about a milliliter per headache, it would cost you a dollar 61 per headache. Using the Doterra product it would be a dollar 95 per headache. That's a good oil. Whereas if you buy generic acetaminophen it's three cents per headache. So I have problems with the cost too. Even if the study's right, even if the study, even if it's right. But it's like a lot of products that aren't regulated, that aren't evidence-based.

We don't know. We don't know if they work. We don't know if they don't. We don't know what all the potential side of things are. We know if they work. I mean, we know if they work, right? If they can cite some anecdotal evidence of when a French dude put his hand in a pot a hundred years ago Certainly the the thousands and millions of other people who have tried these products with no effect They actually they don't work actually we were wrong about this. They don't do anything And just because something is natural doesn't make it better called the natural fallacy And just because something is really old doesn't make it better. It's called the appeal, the ancient wisdom, also a fallacy. And at the end of the day, the big concern

is that maybe this won't hurt people, but if they seek it out instead of actual medicine, then it can. So right now, I would say I would not advise buying a lot of these products. Sorry. Well folks, that's going to do it for this week on Sovons. Thanks so much for the tax base for you. So it was on Medicines at the International Program.

Thank you to you. And I'm Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. And it's only Dr. Hold your hand. And as always, don't do it on your head! Maximumfun.org. Comedy and culture. Artists don't. Audience supported.