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Home Remedies
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Aromatherapy
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What is Aromatherapy ?
The word Aroma Therapy means 'treatment using
scents'. It refers to the use of essential oils in Holistic
Healing to improve health and emotional well-being and in
restoring balance to the body. Essential oils are aromatic
essences extracted from plants, flowers, trees, fruit, bark,
grasses and seeds. There are more than 150 types of oils
that can be extracted. These oils have distinctive
therapeutic, psychological and physiological properties
that improve health and prevent illness. All essential oils
have unique healing and valuable antiseptic properties.
Some oils are antiviral, anti-inflammatory,
pain-relieving,antidepressant, stimulating, relaxing,
expectorating, support digestion and have diuretic
properties too.
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Essential oils get absorbed into our body and exert an influence on it. The residue gets dispersed from the body
naturally. They can also affect our mind and emotions. They enter the body in three ways: by inhalation,
absorption and consumption.
From the chemist's point of view, essential oils are a mixture of organic compounds viz., ketones, terpenes,
esters, alcohol, aldehyde and hundreds of other molecules which are extremely difficult to classify, as they are
small and complex. The essential oils' molecules are small. They penetrate human skin easily and enter the blood
stream directly and finally get flushed out through our elementary system.
A concentrate of essential oils is not greasy; it is more like water in texture and evaporates quickly. Some of
them are light liquid insoluble in water and evaporate instantly when exposed to air. It would take 100 kg of
lavender to yield 3 kg of lavender oil; one would need 8 million jasmine flowers to yield barely 1 kg of jasmine oil.
Some of these aroma oils are very expensive. They are extracted using maceration. The purification process
called defleurage is employed, and in some cases fat is used instead of oil. Then this process, called enfleurage,
is used for final purification.
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