



by Dr. David Stewart, Ph.D.

The Chemistry of Essential Oils

If you tell most medical doctors that essential oils bring about healing with no negative side effects, they won’t believe you. This is because in medical school, students are repeatedly told by their professors that all effective medicines have negative side effects, and if they don’t then they can’t be effective.

When I was in medical school one professor emphasized this point in a colorful, graphic manner with specially prepared slides. In each slide specific drugs were depicted as evil looking demons or goblins. As he presented each picture, he explained, “Although ugly and capable of doing harm, these ‘demons’ are also the bearers of some good. So long as the benefits outweigh the risks, we use them,” he summarized. “We have no choice,” he continued, “because if a drug has no dangers, then it can have no benefits. That’s just the way it is. And that’s why it is essential that only qualified physicians be allowed to prescribe medicines,” he concluded.

Actually, the professor was telling the truth. Within the restricted practice of allopathy (MDs) the only real medicines are physician prescribed pharmaceuticals. Such medicines always do have negative side effects. All of them. No exceptions. Hence, doctors are trained to accept the bad with the good as the price of effective medicine.

The Danger is in the Drug Itself

The dangers of prescription drugs are intrinsic to the drugs themselves, not in how they are administered. No matter how careful the physician in prescribing and how compliant the patient in following doctor’s orders, even then deaths and damages occur. In fact, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, more than 100,000 Americans die every year, not from illegal drugs, not from drug overdoses, not from over-the-counter drugs, and not from drug abuses, but from properly prescribed, properly taken prescriptions. In this country, more people die from doctor’s prescriptions every ten days than were killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Why is this so? Why do allopathic drugs always have undesirable effects (along with their apparent benefits) while one can find healing with natural products, such as essential oils, with no undesirable effects? Here is why.

Why Companies Deliberately Sell Dangerous Products

It is illegal to patent any natural product. The way to big profits in the medicine industry is to create an unnatural substance that never before existed in nature, then patent it, and obtain a monopoly. Hence, the molecules of pharmaceutical drugs are all strange to the human body. In all the history of humankind, such molecules were never encountered or taken into any human body. Hence, the body does not easily metabolize them. God never made your body to accept and deal with these chemicals and antibiotics.

Non-toxic natural organic substances are usually easily eliminated by the body when their usefulness has run their course. Up to a point, your body can even deal with and eliminate natural toxic substances. But when your body receives a synthetic substance, even one that may seem benign or inert (like plastic), your body does not know how to metabolize and eliminate it. If sent to the liver to break it down into disposable compounds, the liver says, “Hey. What is this? I don’t know what to do with it. Here kidneys, you take it.” Then the kidneys react saying, “Hey liver, don’t send it to us. We don’t know what it is either. Send it to the pancreas. Maybe it will have an enzyme that can deal with it.” Then the pancreas objects, “Hey guys, what do you think you are doing? I don’t want this stuff. Dump it in the blood or the lymph or try the spleen. Maybe the spleen can filter this thing out or something.” Finally, the substance ends up in the long term waste holding area of the body (usually fat tissue, including the brain) where it can remain for years and even for a lifetime, perturbing normal body functions as long as it remains. That’s why you can find traces of prescription drugs in your body taken in childhood, decades ago.

On the other hand, natural molecules, such as those found in essential oils, are easily metabolized by the body. In fact, your body was created to handle them. When an essential oil molecule finds the receptor sites it was designed to fit and conveys its information to the cell, or participates in other therapeutic functions, it then goes on its way to the liver and the kidneys and moves out of the body. Its benefits have been conveyed and its job is complete.

By contrast, the unnatural molecules of man-made drugs attach themselves to various tissues, disrupting normal function for years while the body tries to figure out what to do with them. Meanwhile, they wreak mischief with our bodily functions and even our minds.

Who is in Control?

Another reason commercial drug companies don’t want to sell natural products is that they are not in complete control of their production. When you synthesize everything in a laboratory, you are in control. You can produce your medicines at will, in any quantity, whenever you choose. This way you can meet market demands as they materialize.

When you depend on nature to grow your product, God is in control. You are at the mercy of the seasons. You can only grow so much with a given year’s crop. If a year’s supply runs out before the next crop is ready for harvest, then you and your customers just have to wait. Meanwhile, you lose potential sales and profits.

Drug companies want to be totally in charge of producing their products. They don’t want God to be in charge. By omitting God from the manufacture of their medicines, they have omitted his healing power.

Drugs versus Oils

Drugs and oils work in opposite ways. Drugs toxify. Oils detoxify. Drugs clog and confuse receptor sites. Oils clean receptor sites.

Drugs depress the immune system. Oils strengthen the immune system. Antibiotics attack bacteria indiscriminately, killing both the good and the bad. Oils attack only the harmful bacteria, allowing our body’s friendly flora to flourish.

Drugs are one-dimensional, programmed like robots to carry out certain actions in the body, whether the body can benefit from them or not. When body conditions change, drugs keep on doing what they were doing, even when their actions are no longer beneficial.

Essential oils are multi-dimensional, filled with homeostatic intelligence to restore the body to a state of healthy balance. When body conditions change, oils adapt, raising or lowering blood pressure as needed, stimulating or repressing enzyme activity as needed, energizing or relaxing as needed. Oils are smart. Drugs are dumb.

Drugs are designed to send misinformation to cells or block certain receptor sites in order to trick the body into giving up symptoms. But drugs never deal with the actual causes of disease. They aren’t designed for that purpose. While they may give prompt relief for certain uncomfortable symptoms, because of their strange, unnatural design, they will always disrupt certain other bodily functions. Thus, you always have some side effects.

Oil molecules send information to cells and cleanse receptor sites so that they bring your body back to natural function. Oils are balancing to the body. Drugs are unbalancing to the body. Oils address the causes of disease at a cellular level by deleting misinformation and reprogramming correct information so that cells function properly and in harmony with one another. With drugs, misinformation is fed into the cells so that some temporary relief may be obtained, but there is never any true healing. Drugs only trade one kind of disease for another.

Because essential oils properly applied always work toward the restoration of proper bodily function, they do not cause undesirable side effects. They are feeding the body with truth. Drugs feed the body with lies. While no amount of truth can contradict itself, it doesn’t take many lies before contradictions occur and the body suffers ill effects.

Eighteen Doctors Speak Out

Not all physicians are caught up in the idea that the only good medicines are ones that can also be harmful. Here are some comments by physicians, themselves, on the practice of medicine.

“Every educated physician knows that most diseases are not appreciably helped by medicine.”

Richard C. Cabot, M.D. Professor Harvard School of Medicine; Author of Differential Diagnosis, The Art of Ministering to the Sick, and other books.

“The cause of most disease is in the poisonous drugs physicians superstitiously give in order to effect a cure.”

Charles E. Page, M.D.

“Medicines are of subordinate importance because of their very nature, they can only work symptomatically.”

Hans Kusche, M.D.

“The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.”

William Osler, M.D.

“If all the medicine in the world were thrown into the sea, it would be bad for the fish and good for humanity”

O.W. Holmes, M.D. American Poet, Professor of Medicine, Dartmouth College and Harvard University

“Drug medications consist in employing, as remedies for disease, those things which produce disease in well persons. Its materia medica is simply a lot of drugs or chemicals or dye-stuffs—in a word poisons. All are incompatible with vital matter; all produce disease when brought in contact in any manner with the living; all are poisons.”

R.T. Trail, M.D. Author of The True Healing Art and other books. Quote from a lecture to members of Congress and the medical profession, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C.

“Every drug increases and complicates the patients condition.”

Robert Henderson, M.D.

“The greatest part of all chronic disease is created by the suppression of acute disease by drug poisoning.”

Henry Lindlahr, M.D. Author of Diagnostic Methods, Nature Cure: Philosophy and Practice, Natural Therapeutics, and other books.

“Medicine is only palliative, for back of disease lies the cause, and this cause no drug can reach.”

Wier Mitchel, M.D.

“Medical practice has neither philosophy nor common sense to recommend it. In sickness the body is already loaded with impurities. By taking drug – medicines more impurities are added, thereby the case is further embarrassed and harder to cure.”

Elmer Lee, M.D. Past Vice President, Academy of Medicine.

“Our figures show approximately four and one half million hospital admissions annually due to the adverse reactions to drugs. Further, the average hospital patient has as much as thirty percent chance, depending how long he is in, of doubling his stay due to adverse drug reactions.”

Milton Silverman, M.D. Professor of Pharmacology, University of California. Author, The Drugging of America, Prescription for Death, and other books.

“What hope is there for medical science to ever become a true science when the entire structure of medical knowledge is built around the idea that there is an entity called disease which can be expelled when the right drug is found?”

John H. Tilden, M.D. Author of Impaired Health, Etiology, Hygiemic, and Dietetic Treatment of Appendicitis, and other books and articles.

“We are prone to thinking of drug abuse in terms of the male population and illicit drugs such as heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. It may surprise you to learn that a greater problem exists with millions of women dependent on legal prescription drugs.”

Robert Mendelsohn, M.D. Chairman, Illinois State Medical Licensing Board, Author of Confessions of a Medical Heretic, How to Raise a Healthy Child in Spite of Your Doctor, and other books.

“Why would a patient swallow a poison because he is ill, or take that which would make a well man sick.”

L.F. Kebler, M.D. Author of Technical Drug Studies, Medicated Soft Drinks, and other works.

“Drugs never cure disease. They merely hush the voice of nature’s protest, and pull down the danger signals she erects along the pathway of transgression. Any poison taken into the system has to be reckoned with later on even though it palliates present symptoms. Pain may disappear, but the patient is left in a worse condition, though unconscious of it at the time.”

Daniel. H. Kress, M.D. Author of The Cost to Society of Cigarettes: A Century of Analysis, Ulcers and Smoking, and other books.

“There are over 10 million adverse reactions yearly from FDA-approved over-the-counter and prescription drugs. We are not talking about mild nausea or headaches. Between 60,000 and 140,000 people die each year from adverse drug reactions. Each year, more Americans die after taking prescription drugs than died in the entire Vietnam war. Over half the drugs approved by the FDA since 1976 were later found to be much more toxic than previously thought. Several had to be removed from the market.”

Julian Whitaker, M.D. Author of Reversing Heart Disease, Guide to Natural Healing, The Heart Surgery Trap, and other books.

“There are significant efforts by insurance companies to exclude preventive health care and education and the use of natural, inexpensive remedies, while ignoring the benefits of nutrition. At the same time they pay huge medical claims to hospitals for surgery and pharmaceutical products. There is an unwritten agreement between hospitals and insurance providers to reimburse the hospitals for services performed in hospitals – to scratch each other’s back – so to speak. There is a hidden agenda in this. If insurance providers pay hospitals for patients’ medical claims, then at the end of the year the insurance companies can go to the state insurance commissions with their track records and request a premium increase. A premium increase translates into more profit for the insurance carriers as well as the hospitals.”

Terry S. Friedmann, M.D. Author of Freedom Through Health and other publications. Co-founder and Board Member, American Holistic Medical Association.

“The necessity of teaching mankind not to take drugs and medicines, is a duty incumbent upon all who know their uncertainty and injurious effects; and the time is not far distant when the drug system will be abandoned.”

Charles Armbruster, M.D.

So there you have it, why oils heal and drugs don’t. Let’s hope Dr. Armbruster is right, that “the time is not far distant when the drug system will be abandoned.” Pharmaceutical companies and their physician drug dealers could market and sell natural products with genuine healing capabilities, but most won’t. There isn’t any money in it.

Emergency Medicine is the Best of Medicine

In Dr. Robert Mendelsohn’s book, Confessions of a Medical Heretic, he describes medicine as a practice of religion rather than a practice of science. Doctors practice what they believe, not what they can substantiate by valid science. According to Mendelsohn, in the religion of medicine, physicians are the high priests and their ecclesiastical robes are their white coats. Hospitals are the temples where many holy waters are dispensed in the form of drugs, antibiotics, and vaccines. People tithe to the church of medicine by dutifully paying their insurance premiums. The word “prescription” is very close to the term “prescriptural,” thus implying a scriptural basis for their use. The Holy Bible containing the scriptures of medicine is the Pharmaceutical PDR. For millions of people, their faith and confidence in the religion of medicine is far greater than their belief in the institutions of worship they may attend. In a crisis, they would sooner call 911 than call upon God in prayer.

Dr. Mendelsohn was a practicing pediatrician at the Michael Reese Medical Center in Chicago, a professor at the University of Illinois School of Medicine, Chairman of the Illinois State Licensing Board, and appeared on national television many times. He is author of another book entitled, How to Raise a Healthy Child in Spite of Your Doctor, where he states, “When it comes to treating a sick child, one grandmother is worth two pediatricians.” He also often said, “If you always assume your doctor is wrong, most of the time you will be right.” In Dr. Mendelsohn’s opinion, “The best of medicine is emergency medicine.” I agree. When it comes to chronic disease, they have little or nothing to offer – no cures, only treatments and disease management.

I don’t want to imply that there is no use for medical care as we have it today. If I were in a serious accident with a massive head injury, damage to my internal organs, or a broken limb, I would want to go to the nearest emergency room as fast as possible with the best physicians and nurses on staff. Allopathic medicine is wonderful in a crisis and saves many lives. Emergency medicine is what they do best. In a traumatic situation where you could die unless immediate action is taken, allopathy with all of its drugs, surgeries, equipment, and other paraphernalia can be just what you need to get through the crisis.

But as for healing, allopathic medicine doesn’t offer much. After you have been rescued by allopathic measures from imminent death in an emergency situation, the healing is still up to you by seeking other modalities. And when it comes to chronic illness like cancer, arthritis, diabetes, or cardiovascular disease, allopathy has no cures and usually makes matters worse.

One reason medical practitioners do best in a crisis is because that is the emphasis in their training. In fact, in America, 85% of medical expenditures are for crisis applications – responding to accidents, acute life-threatening conditions, or patching up the body when seriously advanced disease has occurred and death may be imminent. Meanwhile, less than 6% of health care expenditures are for prevention and wellness education.

True healing can only take place with the participation of the patient on all levels – mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical. The idea of “leaving it to the doctor” leads to unending sickness and poor health. Health care and health maintenance is something you do for yourself, with the help of God. Not something for which you pay your money and continue to do as you please without altering your lifestyle.

Health care is your responsibility – not the government’s, not the insurance company’s, not the health care system’s, and not the doctor’s.

Can the Present Health Care System Change?

In my opinion, changing the medical system toward natural and spiritual forms of healing that encourage more individual responsibility is impossible. The system can’t change. It won’t change. It must be replaced. There was a time for horses and buggies, but when automobiles came along people gave up their former ways of transportation. There is also a time to repair your car and keep it, and a time to discard it for a new one. The medical profession is a sophisticated machine, but it rests on a fallacious foundation. Its philosophical basis is like a Model-T Ford stuck in the mud that can’t move and won’t change.

There is a time to repair the old car and a time to replace it. The current medical system is an old car, beyond repair, parked on a false foundation. It survives, not because it serves the good of humanity, but because it has become politically entrenched in our society. The time has come to remove its legal franchise and replace it by allowing alternative modalities to flourish free of the shackles placed upon them by allopathy’s monopolistic intent.

Terry Friedmann, MD, in his book, Freedom Through Health, envisions a new holistic system to replace the current one that emphasizes personal responsibility and fosters cooperative relationships among many modalities with allopathy playing only a minor role. Dr. Friedmann’s new health care model would include nutrition, exercise, stress management, and aromatherapy, to address the whole person – mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In their books, Robert Mendelsohn, MD, and Richard Gerber, MD, also foresee a new holistic medical paradigm – one not dependent on allopathic drugs and procedures as its primary focus.

The time has come to move on to paradigms and modalities based on different premises than those that underlie modern allopathy. Those of you who have opted out of the system in favor of essential oils and their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual benefits are among the pioneers who are replacing the system.

As for those of you who have taken over-the-counter or prescription drugs over long periods of time, essential oils are your best friend because they can cleanse the residues of these toxins from your system once and for all and help restore your body back to its natural healthy state.

Excerpted from the book: The Chemistry of Essential Oils Made Simple: God’s Love Manifest in Molecules – Chapter 11

Copyright Care Publications – All rights reserved.

About the Author

Dr. David Stewart studied theology, philosophy, and English at Central Methodist College in Fayette, Missouri (1955-58) and studied chemistry, biology and social sciences at Central Missouri State University in Warrensburg (1962-63). He also studied commercial photography at Los Angeles Trade Technical College (1959-60). He completed a BS degree in Mathematics and Physics at Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy in 1965 and was salutatorian of his graduating class. His MS and PhD degrees are in geophysics (theoretical seismology) and were earned from the University of Missouri at Rolla in 1969 and 1971 respectively. He spent a semester in medical school at the University of North Carolina (1973) and has been a Certified Childbirth Educator (CCE) with the American Academy of Husband-Coached Childbirth (AAHCC) since 1975.

Dr. Stewart is also a Registered Aromatherapist (RA) with the nationally recognized Aromatherapy Registration Council (ARC), which is endorsed by the National Association of Holistic Aromatherapists (NAHA), of which he is a member.

He has held positions as a hydraulic engineer and hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Southern California (1965-67). He was a professor on the faculty of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, (1971-1978) and also held a professorship at Southeast Missouri State University (1988-1993). He was also a part-time United Methodist Pastor (1993-94, 1997-99) in rural Missouri. He has been the Executive Director of the InterNational Association of Parents and Professionals for Safe Alternatives in Childbirth (NAPSAC International) since its founding in 1975.

For most of his professional career, Dr. Stewart has been self-employed as an author and lecturer, mainly in the area of alternative health care. He has also served on advisory committees to the American Public Health Association (APHA) and the American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM). He has testified as an expert on health matters before state legislative committees, U.S. congressional committees, medical licensing boards and courts of law throughout the U.S. as well as in Canada.

He has authored or coauthored over 200 published works including more than a dozen books (including Healing Oils of the Bible). Two of his books won the “Books of the Year” Award from the American Journal of Nursing. One of his flyers on breastfeeding (published by La Leche League International, LLLI) sold over two million copies in ten languages.

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