You are such an important person in the aromatherapy essential oil world for safety. So again, thank you so much for this. So what I want to know, and I think what people would really like to know is, what do you see as the number one safety issue? When you're looking at everything and people are contacting you, what is the biggest thing that they talk about with safety? Well, I think that's easy to answer that to me. Yes. I mean, I think the biggest risk that I've always seen is the way people use essential oils on skin. Because it's a high risk business. People often say that essential oils are natural. They're made by nature. Therefore, they're safe. But I think what is forgotten in this is that in the plant, the essential oil is about 100 times less concentrated than when it's distilled. So they're natural but we artificially concentrate them and put them in little bottles. Then if you take that essential oil and put it on your skin, bad things can happen. The more concentrated the oil on your skin, the essential oil is on your skin, the higher the risk. It's a linear correlation. Unfortunately, the risk isn't the same for every individual because there are individual differences. But also there are very few benefits of using very concentrated essential oils on the skin. So one exactly as in wound healing, we actually do need to use five percent or more in wound healing otherwise, it doesn't work. Usually, you need five to 10 percent concentration. But if you're looking at a cosmetic effect, you want to about one percent of essential oil. If you were to use five percent for cosmetic effect, it probably wouldn't work. Probably wouldn't get much benefit, because it's going to dry the skin, and probably again you have an increased risk of irritation or other kinds of adverse reaction. So I would say this is the most common problem. Right after that, sort of a close second is very young children getting hold of the bottom of essential oil two to three years old and drinking it. Most of us think they wouldn't do that, it tastes very strong. How do we get a cap off the bottle. But they do and they do. They get the cap off and they drink it and children as young as two years old have been known to unscrew the cap and drink the contents of the bottle. About once every five years that's a fatality. That kid dies because of this. So it's quite uncommon. But more common than that is a rapid visit to the emergency room and emergency care, without which probably more children would die. So this a very serious risk that obviously is the responsibility of the parents to make sure their kids do not have access to any essential oils. Thank you. That is exactly what we need to hear, and what we're professing to the masses out there. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation and a lot of promotion of pretty unsafe use of essential oils that we're always trying to find ways of teaching people this. So what you say goes along way, so I really appreciate that. What about people who say, "Well, I've been using essential oil undiluted on my skin for a long time, and I've never had anything happened to me". I've read something earlier today and I just said, "Personal experience isn't evidence". It's a few words but there's a lot of truth. Personal experiences isn't evidence. So we look at dermatological testing, patch testing on if you put all the evidence together, tens of thousands of people. Through that kind of testing, we can get some idea of relative risk. So we can say we know that tea tree oil, Elaine healing oil, lemongrass oil present a relatively high risks for essential oils on the skin. Cinnamon bark oil [inaudible] compared to for example, coriander seed oil, or lavender oil or palm oil which represents a lower level of risk. That's not to say that it was safe to use undiluted on the skin, they are not. But guess the relative risk through patch density, and the fact that one person may have used, let's say undiluted lemongrass or cinnamon bark and not out of a reaction. That's absolutely possible. We know that it's possible. I doesn't mean it's safe for everybody. I totally agree with that. You mentioned patch testing, and you know so many of us were promoting patch testing, and we've included it in our hospital policies, which boils down to patients not staying in the hospitals or clinical settings very long. So in reality if we add any, typically what we'll use this is two percent diluted that's already prepared. But the recommendation is, if somebody really does have some sensitivities like don't use topical, just use inhalation. I learned a lot from you in your safety course last summer and your discussion on the patch testing, and it's not very reliable. So that is actually what I'm teaching now and do the dose escalation. So do you want to just touch on that? And what do you think about patch testing. Yes. What I was saying just now is the patch testing as used by dermatologists. I mean, these are patches made for this purpose. If you're not a dermatologist, you can't buy these patches, or if you're not in the conventional healthcare system, maybe much of the audience is, you can't buy these patches, and there really isn't an equivalent that we can use. A regular Band-Aid is not the same for many reasons. But on top of that, doing patch testing is a demanding process, need to know exactly how to do it, how to interpret the results. It takes several days. It's not something you can do in half an hour. So I don't recommend that practitioners use perhaps system in general. I do think it's easier, as you say, either avoid topical use altogether, if you feel that your patient is high risk, for that kind of reaction, or just go low and maybe escalate the dose slightly, put the concentration on skin. Thank you very much for that. So this is pretty much of what I wanted to focus on with you. Do you have anything else to add? Not in the way of safety. I've been thinking a lot about research, and how it's done with essential oil. So I don't know if I can address that here. But one thing I see in the single case studies and also in small clinical trials, they tend to be small in aromatherapy. One thing I see is that, people use blends of essential oils, which I understand, it's just not very useful in terms of research, and I feel sometimes that we're trying to run before we can walk. Why not try a single oil and compare it to a blend of two oils, and see which works well because while there is evidence that blends are better than single oils. There's also evidence to the contrary because think about it like this. We often talk about essential oil constituents and how that makes our essential oils really useful, and practical, and therapeutic, but the more you mix different oils together, the more you are diluting therapeutic constituents in the single oil. So in fact, I believe that there is a sweet spot somewhere around two oils, three oils, maybe four, where you can potentially get a benefit. But then, if you keep adding more and more essential oils, if you've got five, 10, 15 essential oils. I've seen products with 40 or 50 oils. A chance that [inaudible] at doing anything are very slim, honestly. I feel like the way we approach research, has so many, there's so many things we can do better. I think that is one of them, using fewer oils. You just come out with a small trial and using five oils, and if it works, that's fine. But what does that tell us? It tells that that particular blend of those five oils in that ratio, have that effect, and that does tell us something. But we don't learn anything about the individual oils, or whether, in fact, a different blend, or a simpler blend, might have had a better effect. So that's one thing I would suggest in terms of research, and another really important point. If you ever do any research with essential oils and publish that research, you have to analyze the essential oil, or the blend, and publish that in the research, otherwise it is useless. It doesn't work just to say, we used rosemary oil, and spike lavender oil, and [inaudible] oil. That doesn't tell us what you used. You have to do the analysis, the full analysis, a lab analysis, so we can see what the constituents were. There are at least seven, probably eight different types of rosemary oil. They're quite different to one another, and it is useless to say I used rosemary oil, it tells us nothing. So I'm sounding a bit anxious here, but it's just that I read a lot of research, and so much of it, datas don't do this. Even when I spoke to some dermatologists, who publish quite a bit of research on essential constituents or essential oils and adverse reactions on the skin. I said, well, okay, when you say you used [inaudible] oil in this research. But there's no transparency. Where do they all come from? You didn't publish an analysis. How do we know if we're essential [inaudible] and not some other type of sandalwood. How did we know it was Jen? He said actually, you're right. Which I wasn't expecting. He's a very well-respected German dermatologist. He said, yes, you have a good point. So it's important. I really appreciate that, and I teach university students as well. So they're having to look at the literature, and we do talk about that. It surprises me that some of the newer studies are like this because I would think that by now, people would realize if they're using essential oils, we need to know what's in that essential oil. So thank you for bringing that up. We need to have which came what type it is and you need to narrow this, Jen. Exactly. But oxidized and it was all much of things. Yes. Yes. Well, I appreciate this conversation once again. Before you go, is there any last words of wisdom? No, I think you've drummed the depths for today. Thank you so much and thank you, Hannah, for helping. So I'll be in contact with you and let you know when this launches. Yes, please do. Please do let me know. Okay. We send a lot of people to your tutoring institute website which by the way is phenomenal. I mean you've done a great job with keeping it up-to-date and a lot of the safety information. We're constantly sending people there. We're working hard on it and there's always a lot to do. Yes. Well, thank you, and I know it's evening there now, right? It's only 20 after five. Okay. Well, thank you, and have a great rest of your day. You too. Okay. Bye. Bye.
