What is Aromatherapy?
Due to side effects of allopathic treatment, alternative medicines and treatments have become popular. We see various ancient treatments coming back in vogue, which are completely natural. One of them is Aromatherapy. Aromatherapy can be termed as a holistic treatment using plant extracts.
Principal constituents
Plant extracts are either naturally extracted oils or plant compounds. The oils that are used in aromatherapy are completely natural; which means that the oils are extracted from parts of the plants like leaves, stem, roots, flowers, seeds, bark etc. Plant compounds too are completely natural and the compounds can be petals of a flower, the stem of the plant or mashed leaves, or a mixture of two or more plants to give it a complete effect. These oils are mostly called as essential oils and the fragrance that they emit is very mild. Though these are called oils they are basically juices, hence they may not be in the form of oils. The oils are produced by distillation of the juice and hence the quantity is minute and the purity, very high. Hence, we need to add very few drops of these oils to get the required result whenever they are used. The usage of oils and compounds are done differently but all of them are used for treatment of some form of ailment or other.
Complete treatment
We term the treatment holistic because it not only treats the body but also the mind. Using natural products, it tries to balance out and treat ailments that affect the body as well as the mind. Aromatherapy tries to attain the perfect balance that will lead to a healthy life. It relaxes, detoxificates and rejuvenates the body and mind to make a healthy being. The most commonly used application of aromatherapy is the massage and scented bath after the massage. Besides massage, aromatherapy uses other application of oils or compounds. These are mostly applied topically that is on the skin or hair to give best results. There is no scientific proof that shows that aromatherapy actually heals a particular ailment but there is a visible relaxation of the patient’s body and mind after undergoing treatment. As there are no side effects to this kind of treatment, it is usually not frowned upon by practicing doctors and can be coupled with treatment of chronic and fatal ailments like Cancer where relaxation of the mind is necessary to heal the body. Hence, it becomes beneficial to take advantage of aromatherapy that balances your body and mind.
