TRUessence ESSENTIAL OILS ENHANCING THE IMMUNE SYSTEM

Immune System Enhancing

Scientific literature is replete with studies about how essential oils can directly destroy microbes such as bacteria, fungus and even viruses. Other studies have shown essential oils’ ability to modulate inflammation and enhance circulation.

But a most important question behind all this research is, do essential oils just do their own work, or do they also somehow support the human body in ways that enhance and increase the human body’s own processes to heal itself?  It has been believed since ancient times that essential oils somehow improve and enhance the body’s ‘terrain’ or functional ability to take care of itself.

In 2008 a research team from the Institute of Neurobiology and Molecular Medicine in Rome, Italy, set out to scientifically verify whether this was indeed true.  They reasoned that if they could observe and measure that the presence of an essential oil actually stimulated and increased the natural disease-fighting activity of human immune cells, then they could conclude that essential oils enhanced the normal functioning of the immune system – in addition to their known antimicrobial properties.

The primary disease-fighting cells in the body are macrophages, a variety of white blood cells that seek out and destroy foreign/disease microbes.  The Italian research team used elaborate tests and an electron microscope to determine whether human macrophages increased their phagocytic activity (foreign cell killing) in the presence of an essential oil solution, which in this case was Eucalyptus.

They found that the addition of the essential oil did in fact increase the activity of human macrophages, “dramatically stimulating their phagocytic response.”   Furthermore, they reasoned, since Eucalyptus essential oils did increase human immune system activity; further research should be done using essential oils which could drive “the development of a . . . new family of immune-regulatory agents useful in immune-suppressive pathologies, infectious diseases and after tumor chemotherapy.”

Copyright © March, 2010 VitalScience.org