A
NEW DEAL FOR AROMTHERAPY (– I wish!)
Copyright
Tony Burfield 2003
Few would argue that the aromatherapy
community by its very nature is scattered across several continents, is
disorganised, and is under-funded perhaps because it is essentially composed of
single practitioners, small schools, businesses and traders. The are a number of
professional aromatherapy organisations, but the largest and most important of
these are not independently chaired, and from my perspective are comprised of
officials who are business professionals first and foremost, often able to use
their organisations’ good offices to promote their own financial interests.
This can easy be verified by looking at some of the leading Aromatherapy
Journals, where you will often find the Journal’s editor promoting their own
businesses via advertisements in the back pages, and his/her business associates
similarly advertising and indeed penning many of the articles and reviews. Those
of us who dare to be critical of this unprofessional behaviour have been
deliberately sidelined, and at times subjected to positive discrimination.
OK you might say, this can happen in the
best of professions – pardon me – it doesn’t. The aromatherapy industry
doesn’t seem to be able to produce the required ethical and effective policies
to deal with current issues – it doesn’t seem to have an aware or
resourceful enough leadership. Many aromatherapy oil traders sell essential oil
from threatened species, they sell non-IFRA oils without advising customers of
adverse health effects, they sell oils without supplying the requisite MSDS
sheets, and they sell oils which are not 100% derived from the named botanical
species. There is no effective internal industry policing or self-regulation of
these ‘basic tools’ of the trade. Worse still, many of the officials in
aromatherapy professional organisations sell essential oils themselves, and so
have no wish to change the status quo – they are not, almost without
exception, chartered chemists, or chartered biologists, and so do not have the
necessary skills, training, equipment or status to independently ascertain
whether the oils that they are selling are in fact “clinical grade” or
“therapeutic grade”, as their promotional literature often suggests. It’s
this conflict of interest situation which prevents the aromatherapy profession
healthily moving forward. In any case the descriptors “clinical / therapeutic
grade” for retailed essential oils imply a medicinal effect, which of course
cannot be claimed by aromatherapy oil sellers, but these individuals are
themselves often ignorant of the position taken by the inspecting authorities
(i.e. the Medicines Control Agency in the UK) on these matters.
The methyl eugenol issue and the 26
allergens issue (see elsewhere on this website) have both shown us that the
aromatherapy community overall is at best poorly equipped, and realistically too
ineffectively led, to give an effective authoritative response to these
important matters – a independent non-scientific survey carried out recently
by the author revealed that most aromatherapists only join these organisations
to obtain professional insurance cover anyway. Now it seems that the fatal blow
for aromatherapy's dwindling fortune's today in Europe might well be the
implementation of the EU’s Pharmaceuticals Directive – which many of us will
have heard about only via the current edition of “The Ecologist” (June
2003), rather than through our professionally elected aromatherapy
representatives (a summary of this issue is to be found at: http://www.theecologist.org/archive_article.html?article=422&category=50
; there is some more information on this on http://www.healthfreedommovement.com/eu_legislation.htm).
In the aromatherapy world there is a
failing:
·
to properly advise over ways to recognise essential oil adulteration
·
to provide and universally agree the necessary analytical standards to authenticate
aromatherapy essential oils (not just to analyse
them)
·
to provide a coherent policy with respect to GM technology which is
severely threatening the organic essential oils industry
·
to monitor & maintain satisfactory educational standards in
aromatherapy teaching and to deal with technically incorrect teaching material
·
to recommend alternatives where oils from threatened species are sold
into aromatherapy practice
·
to consult with experts on technical problems and freely distribute
findings
·
to provide guidance on current issues (such as the new generation of
“low allergen” essential oils now hitting the market)
·
to advise over those essential oils which should be treated as
“controlled substances”
We need an independently and more
professionally led aromatherapy community, which is totally transparent in its
dealings. In short we need a new deal for aromatherapy. The dinosaurs in
this profession need to go, in order for aromatherapy to gain a new
respectability.
Tony Burfield.