dogs are individuals essential oil observations draft 1
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Rita Hogan: [00:00:00] Hi, this is Rita Hogan and welcome to the Dogs Our Individuals Podcast. I'm a clinical canine Herbalist, and I've been practicing for over 20 years. This podcast is all about your dog through an herbal lens. So let's get to it and dive right in. Hello. We are gonna talk today about essential oils. I had someone write into the podcast and asked about essential oils, and I am going to answer.
So before we begin, I want to thank my sponsor, adored Beast, APO Carey, and I wanna quickly say, Here in the northern hemisphere, we are entering into spring and the perfect time for adored beasts liver to, so the liver tonic supports liver health and detoxification, and that's what's happening right now.
Our livers are waking up. You're gonna see more itching and scratching and with dogs and people a little more. Tired, kind of slow to get going. Liver is a [00:01:00] water-based glycerin extract of dandelion root. Greater Celine, which is celled Cardis, Marias, which is milk thistle. That's the old Latin name of milk thistle and barberry, which is uh, Burris.
Vulgaris. And together, this is a really good synergistic blend. Herbs that in alcoholic extractions, we don't really wanna give a lot of, uh, celled or barberry. But in this nice, gentle formula that our water-based glycerin extracts, it provides a nice support mechanism for dealing with spring. So liver tonic, you can get it on my [email protected], or you can purchase it throughout the internet as well as at adored.
Papa carey.com. We are gonna talk about essential oils today. I love essential oils. I taught a lovely class or course with Dr. Ila Fishburn on essential Oils [00:02:00] for Dogs Naturally Magazine. That was a lot of fun. You can check that course out on their site. Had a really good time putting that course together for everyone.
I am totally not against essential. But I do have some observations, some beliefs in using them. Some of you may not know what an essential oil is, and it is a volatile oil, okay? It is a volatile oil of aromatic plants. You can't get a lot of essential oil from every plant, but plants that are aromatic.
You can get essential oil from, there are super concentrated extracts, right? And what a lot of people don't realize is in order to get that oil, it's not like getting almond oil where the oil really comes kind of readily. This is from hundreds and sometimes depending on the plant, even thousands of aromatic plants to get like a half an ounce or an ounce of essential oil.
The raw materials for these essential oils are not readily available. And then what I've noticed is conversations. About essential oils can get, [00:03:00] can get nasty. And the reason why is because there's a lot of misinformation. There's a lot of, I just wanna be right. There's a lot of kind of complete disregard for common sense.
And I kind of have a, I mean, a little bit of a, a chip or a beef on some people that have tried to sell me essential oils wouldn't know the plant that that essential oil came from if they were sitting next. On the sidewalk, right? They don't know anything about the plant that it came from. They just know what the essential oil does, what they've been taught that it does.
And that's it. And you gotta have this essential oil. You know, you gotta drink it, put it on your body, put it in your bathtub, put it everywhere. And I'm just not into that. Okay. We need common sense when it comes to these powerful oils, and I'll talk about this in a minute, but they're just not sustainable either.
So we have to be careful about where we're sourcing our essential oils from. But conversations get, can get pretty heated. And I, I just pretty much check out. I don't wanna get in arguments with people what I, I'm saying some of it is absolutely true and [00:04:00] some of it is opinion, and you don't have to. I'm not, uh, committed to that.
Like it's fine. I'm an herbalist, I'm speaking from an herbalist perspective, and I'm speaking up for the plants and that's all I can do. And there's a lot of people out there, and I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but you know, they take a weekend seminar or a 10 hour masterclass and all of a sudden they're an expert.
It takes a long time to be an. In essential oil use the average aroma therapist and that is an expert in essential oil use. The average aroma therapist, certified aroma therapist spends over 200 plus hours in chemistry alone. That's just the chemistry of the essential oils that they're working with 200 plus hours.
And the reason why is because essential oils are complex and that's why you gotta know your plants. As an herbalist, I find it very interesting that some people are afraid that they might give too much her. To their dog, or they might, a tincture might have too much alcohol in it, and you're only given a couple of [00:05:00] drops, then they're freaking out.
But they're not afraid to give an essential oil to their dog, which they should be if they knew how complex these oils are. A lot of them are all natural. All of them should be all natural. But unfortunately, we have greedy, dishonest people in the world that mess things up for other people, and that happens in all categories of life.
Their potency isn't all natural. You can't. That type of potency in the natural world, in a single plant or even in a few plants, again, you need hundreds and depending on the plant, thousands of plants to produce enough essential oil to be used. And here in North America, multi-level marketing companies really introduced essential oils to the general public.
They presented them kind of as a standalone. A system of med, of herbal medicine, of of medicine, of holistic care and essential oils belong to herbal medicine. They're not a standalone system of care. I spec [00:06:00] essential oils. In some of my protocols, I've seen essential oils, work miracles, just like I've seen every other form of herbal medicine work miracles.
You need to know your plants. You wanna know the healing effects on your dog and you wanna know the mental and emotional aspects. And essential oils work very well at that ament, a mental and emotional aspect of your dog. And they also can shift patterns in your dog and cause amazing healing. I'm not saying that they really excel at healing trauma and emotional stagnation.
When you heal trauma and emotional stagnation, your physical body shifts, things get pushed through. We're not separate. Everything's connected, and our emotional self is connected to our physical self. They can't be separated even though a lot of people think that they can. You can either force the body to.
Or you can stimulate healing, and that depends on how you're using them. I could talk about essential oils for hours. One of the things that you need to know about essential oils, they have a distillation process. [00:07:00] Most of them are steam distilled except for citrus RINs. That's different. Those are mechanically pressed for mo.
For the most part, steam distills essential oils, which is your. You know, you're across the board kind of way to extract essential oils that only carries light molecules. And a lot of people think that essential oils can be interchanged with the plants that they came from. And that is not always necessarily true because like, see a, like a tincture of a plant is going to contain large molecule constituents that are not found in essential oils.
Okay. Except for, again, pressed citrus. Like grapefruit essential oil or orange essential oil. Large non aromatic molecules include things like alkaloids, mucilage, and tannins. These are things that offer a lot of healing, but are not necessarily included in steam distilled essential oils. There are some tannins, but tannins are a wide, like a wide range of constituents.
So, and that's another, another podcast, and that would be a very [00:08:00] boring one. By the way, we wanna look at holistic. Use of essential oils. So even in essential oil use, there's, there is allopathic use, there's like, what? Essential oils are good for arthritis. I'm just gonna, you know, start using random ones and see what sticks.
And then there's holistic use and that includes a regard for constituents and intention. Like what? It's our intention for using that essential oil, and you wanna match your dog's needs to the intention of the protocol, because you really should have a protocol and kind of an idea of what you wanna accomplish before you start choosing essential oils.
You want a comprehensive picture of your dog, you know, their diet, their lifestyle, their stress, their emotional state, their medical history. You don't have to have all those things, but it's nice to look at your dog as a complete picture. Using essential oils for their active ingredients is, like I said, allopathic and your dog's condition is not separate from their being.
I recommend what's called, uh, zoo Pharmacognosy, and Carolyn [00:09:00] Ingraham is one of the people that has been practicing Zoo Pharmacognosy the most. I know that when I worked with Dr. Ila Fishburn. Worked on that together. I love this practice because it lets your dog choose what essential oil they want to use, and essential oils are so strong and your dog's olfactory system is so strong that they can choose a lot of the essential oils that they may be interested in, and you don't have to put it on them or in them.
It is traditional aromatherapy, which is used by smelling the essential oil because it's so strong and you offer the essential. With the cap off to your dog, you sit it next to them, and if they're interested, they'll sit by it, they'll lay by it, they'll fall asleep by it, they'll sniff it, or maybe then go lay down or they'll walk out of the room.
There's a lot more to this practice. I'm just kind of giving you a little simple explanation of how to do it, but it's a really safe way to use essential oils. And again, all you have to do is cake. Take the [00:10:00] cap off the bottle, and yes, your dog can smell that oil across the house. So don't think they can't.
Their noises are much stronger than ours. I only recommend using essential oils internally when there's no other option left in holistic healing, and definitely under supervision or part of a comprehensive protocol, and definitely diluted. And if you purchase an internal product with essential oils in it, definitely.
Your dog, that product first to see if they turn and walk away because they'll be able to smell the essential oils in it. A lot of essential oils have been sneaking into products, and definitely you wanna make sure that that is a good fit for your dog and their condition. You don't want to diffuse. So diffusion is putting your essential oil into one of these pretty little misters and letting it missed all over the place, and that's gonna go right into the bloodstream.
Okay? So you don't wanna defuse unless you have a therapeutic reason, [00:11:00] and it needs to be part of an overall protocol. Okay? Diffusion. To everyone in the house. And if you're doing it in a certain room, stick a thick towel underneath the door and on top of the door so that it doesn't get out of that room because you're giving, again, everyone a therapeutic treatment.
And I highly doubt the whole house needs that therapeutic treatment unless maybe you've all been exposed, exposed to mold. Okay? So I don't recommend diffusion for using, uh, with essential oils, and you definitely don't. Diffuse essential oils to make your house smell nice. You could diffuse essential oils, leave the house, use some air cleaning essential oils, and then come back, turn it off, and then let the house settle for a while.
But definitely don't diffuse unless you have a therapeutic purpose. It immediately goes into the bloodstream. I definitely believe that essential oils can have a just profound effect on your dog, but that profound effect demands. [00:12:00] When using essential oils, I think definitely you need answers to your questions like, what are I using it for?
What plant does it come from? Do I know anything about the plant that it comes from? What does that oil do when it enters my dog's body? You know, how will it affect their organs? I think, again, going back to attention is really vital to essential oil use. We need to put our thinking caps on when we're using these strong medicines because our dogs are vulnerable beings and they definitely need care and guidance.
Essential oils are not replacements for pharmaceuticals, even though people are using them as such. Okay? And I would definitely say yes, they are hammer medications in many ways when you need a hammer, essential oil is a good place to start. But they can also have a softness and they can also be very gentle if they're well indicated and used correctly.
One of my favorite aroma therapists and herbalist is, uh, her name is Kathy Skipper, and I featured her in my book, my upcoming book, and she's been using essential oils for over 35 years. I, maybe it could be 40 years by [00:13:00] now, I'm not sure. She's a French trained aromatherapist, and she's a wonderful herbalist and her and her husband.
Do a lot of work around the world with essential oil use and trauma, genetic memory, how the blood holds memory, how the fascia holds memory and emotion, and her use of essential oils I find is profound. I love it. She has a great book called Aromatic Medicine, but she makes a really good point. She said, the more powerful an essential oil is, the less of it you need.
And once effective results have been obtained, it's harmful to the organism to carry on taking it. And that is true, in my opinion, of almost any herbal. Prescribing large doses of essential oils over long periods of time does not apply to safe aromatherapy. When someone says An essential oil is this or that, it definitely doesn't make it true.
Even what I'm saying, not, you know, I don't know. I mean, it could, I could be wrong in [00:14:00] many, many points. I haven't figured that out yet, but I'm open to being wrong. I have every right to being wrong, and a lot of times when you're wrong, you learn things so well, so don't be. However, you can say whatever you want about an essential oil, but it does not make it true.
Do your own research. Okay. Do your own research. Research the chemical constituents. There's a great book by Robert Tiser, who's been doing essential oils for, since like the seventies. He's been doing essential oils. He has a wonderful book about essential oil safety. It's called Essential Oil Safety by Robert Tiser.
It's really an industry standard for Aromatherapists scholars and anyone really interested in using essential. He's definitely a pioneer in the fields of aromatherapy. He's written a lot of books on aromatherapy. He started the Institute for Aromatherapy in London, England. Really great advocate for using aromatherapy safely.
You wanna do that? You wanna use aromatherapy safely. Now, one thing I wanna talk about, Is [00:15:00] sustainability. I think we all need to work on sustainability. Even if you're someone that does not believe in global warming, you should believe in the fact that we're, we are polluting our planet to the 10th power and we are using up resources too fast to be sustainable.
Everyone can get behind that. I think we all figured out in the pandemic when things are not available, it starts to domino and then we're left with. I don't have any toilet paper. Oh my God. Because someone just bought up, you know, 4,500 packs of toilet paper and put it in their house. We expect these things to just show up in our stores, but they do come from somewhere and they have raw materials.
Right. That's why I use recycled toilet paper and bamboo toilet paper and tree free toilet paper cuz I love to, I love trees, but I'm not gonna get on my soapbox about that. But re. Charin, please reconsider toilet paper that's not recycled. Just reconsider. That's all I'm asking. Okay. So sustainability in the aroma therapy world is quite gnarly.
Okay? [00:16:00] Nature really isn't there for us to use up. Okay? It's there to take care of us, and essential oils take so much plant matter to make a really small amount of oil. Now there's a lot of essential oils that are very sustainable, like peppermint. You know, I could. Enough peppermint for 16 ounces of oil just here in the back of my house because peppermint is so prolific.
Lemon balm. Lemon balm. It takes a ton of plants to make a little bit of Melissa oil, which is lemon's balm, Latin name, but it's still plentiful. Okay. Lavender, plentiful, but there's some. Wonderful and beautiful essential oils that are not plentiful and they're endangered. So in the last 15 years, I think essential oil use in North America and Europe has skyrocketed because of multi-level marketing and everyone's selling essential oils.
And if we wanna use pepper dimin as an example, peppermint oil, essential oil. I don't know if you've ever touched a peppermint leaf. Most of us have. You can't even feel it in your hand. Okay. And [00:17:00] it takes 18 pounds of plant matter peppermint leaves to make one ounce of peppermint essential oil. 18 pounds.
That's probably enough to fill up a garage. That's how crazy that is. One drop of essential oil, peppermint essential oil is equal to, are you ready? Drum roll, 75 cups of peppermint tea, 75 cups of peppermint tea that is strong. And I was thinking about some examples to put in my book under essential oils, and there's a lovely plant called Angelica.
It's nice and warming it. It does a lot of wonderful things in the body, and it has these lovely little flowers that you can get essential oil. Peppermint took 18 pounds. Angelica, 30 pounds of Angelica flowers, which are so much lighter than a leaf, a peppermint leaf, 30 pounds of angelical flowers for one ounce of oil.
And then we have Rose, rose. Essential oil. If you ever find rose essential oil for cheap, it's not rose essential [00:18:00] oil. Okay? Rose essential oil. I used to, to purchase rose essential oil for a, an aromatherapy blend that I made temporarily, and it was $380 for a, I think an eighth of an ounce. Okay? $380. I used one drop of the oil.
It takes 40,000 rose petals for one ounce of rose essential oil. Thousand just like the peppermint one drop equals 70 roses. 70 roses for one drop. I was talking about lemon balm. Takes over 6,000 pounds of lemon balm to make one pound. 16 ounces of oil. 6,000 pounds of lemon. Which is just a leaf. So I'm just letting you, you know, let that sink in.
These, this is how powerful these oils are. And so for me as an herbalist, I don't need essential oils that often. I've never, I haven't had to use them. There are a lot of essential oil practitioners out there that I love, like Jade [00:19:00] shoots from the U. New York Institute of Aromatherapy. She's awesome. Okay.
She's making, she's doing really great things. She does a lot of distilling of her own plants and they do a lot of great work. But you know, you have to be careful and I don't look to essential oils first. I look to them last, or if they're very well indicated. Sandalwood is a popular essential oil. It takes 30 years.
You have to wait 30 years to harvest sandalwood essential oil from the sandalwood tree, and it kills the tree In the process of making the essential oil, let that sink. I don't use sandalwood essential oil. I've used sandalwood, but I haven't used, I don't use sandalwood essential oil for that reason. It falls into that category.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. I don't know if you know that category, but I'm very familiar with it. That's a sustainability issue, right? With plants that are not plentiful, and then you have issues with abuse and illegal wildcrafting because users of essential oil are driving up the market.
It's another reason why I don't look to essential oils First. Sustainability [00:20:00] includes people going. And stealing plants that are used for essential oils, uh, that wouldn't readily be available. And we're using our natural resources faster than we can replenish them. There are some endangered plants out there, and you can go to United Plant Savers and see a full list of endangered plants.
And if those plants are endangered, don't use the essential oil please. Use something else and work with companies that are talking about sustainability and ethical sourcing. Look at the companies that you're buying your essential oils from. Do they talk about sustainability? Do they talk about ethical sourcing?
And remember, a lot of companies resell bulk oils into their own packaging. Kinda like my CBD oil in my. I don't make that oil. I work with a company in Colorado that I love and I resell their oil. Okay. So a lot of people aren't working with the distillers for their oil. They're trusting. Another person, like [00:21:00] a, a go-between person, that that oil is pure.
And part of selling quality essential oils is building relationships with distillers and knowing the origin of your oils. Okay. So if I was buying a c b oil from Joe, right, and Joe was buying it from the company in Colorado, that would be a middleman I wouldn't wanna buy from. If the quality of the CBD oil was very important to me, you know, we're not talking about fixed oils like almond oil and you know, apricot oil.
We're talking about things that yield little and are very expensive and take a lot of plant matter that we're growing specifically for an essential oil or for a C B D oil. Before I go, I wanna talk a little bit about deceptive practices. Nature didn't design plants. For mass production of essential oils.
Okay? They weren't designed that way. In fact, as I said earlier, nowhere in nature can you find mass quantities of essential oils, okay? Essential oil distillers, can't guarantee oils like you [00:22:00] could find, let's just say, um, I don't know. Uh, there's a company called Blue River And Blue River Oil. Lavender Oil is fantastic.
And then you got a new batch of that. It was different. It wasn't as fantastic. And now Blue River is the enemy. The thing that you need to know is that batch to batch essential oils can change and they can change in quality from the elevation they're grown at. The moisture that happened that year, the water quality that happened that year, the soil conditions, even the wind can affect the quality of plants and the plants.
Responsible for the type of essential oil that you're gonna get, the quality of the essential oil that you're gonna get. So even your favorite brand can have batches that aren't as good as the year before or the batch before. Okay. It doesn't make the company bad, and the marketing world is really responsible for a lot of misinformation, and it's really rendered essential oil language to the [00:23:00] point of almost being meaningless.
Many companies. You know that, say the word aromatherapy, sell adult oils, where oils that smell like other oils are used to make money. And there are even synthetics that are derived from things like petroleum put in essential oils. So you really wanna make sure that you're getting what you think you're getting.
Like you can see a label that says, made with pure essential. Notice made with, what else are they made with? Okay. It should say a hundred percent pure essential oil or a hundred percent pure essential oil, laven, doula, and gusta FOIA oil. Okay? Something like that. And you could say that like made with pure essential oils, put two drops into apricot oil and call it essential oil.
Made with pure essential oils. So, you know, it comes down to that essential oils are not regulated. You know, there's no grading, there's no therapeutic levels, there's, I mean, therapeutic grade, clinical grade, veterinary grade, those are nothing but [00:24:00] marketing. And it doesn't mean that the people that are using those marketing terms are bad.
Okay? Don't go down that rabbit hole. It's all like right now. All about site engine optimization online. So a lot of little companies that would rather not use. Terms have to use those terms in order to be found. The quality comes from the plants, it comes from how it's harvested, it comes from how it's distilled.
It also comes from how it's stored. Okay. Before it goes gets to you. And just because someone says that an essential oil is medical grade or therapeutic grade or veterinary grade, does that mean it's safe for animals? No. You have to look at the oil as an individual. Are you using that oil? Anything that heals can also harm.
So safety needs to depend on the quality of oil, the individual animal, and how you use it. Okay. That is my rant about essential oils and again, I've used essential oils and had profound results. I've taught essential oil, um, [00:25:00] courses. I love essential oils. However, they're not my first choice. Very, you know, there's many of them that are not sustainable.
That's why I love plant stem cells so much because they are sustainable and there's lots of forms of herbal medicine to choose from. You know, and when you do use essential oils, use them via, you know, aromatherapy practices. Okay? Use them traditionally. Let your dog smell them. Let your dog choose to, to, to use them.
If they want to use the zoo Pharmacognosy, um, you know, check out Carol, Carolyn Ingham's work. Check out Dr. Isla Fish Burn's. There's another woman, her name's Niana. Morag. She has some good work with essential oils, you know, check them out. I will deal with different essential oils, like in how to use them and what they're good for.
In other, um, episodes of this podcast, this is like an. Introductory to essential oil theory. How about that? Okay. I wanna thank you for [00:26:00] joining me. I also wanna thank real mushrooms.com. Real mushrooms.com. I am featuring their REI mushroom. You can get [email protected] [email protected]. Rei mushrooms really great for this time of year because we're having fluctuations in temperature.
It's excellent for modulating the immune system, and you can. To, for especially those dogs that have a hard time transitioning from winter to spring. I would definitely recommend Rei Mushroom from now until I would say, you know, June definitely you could use it again. Real mushrooms.com. Rei mushroom. REI mushroom is neutral to warming.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out my Energetics course on my website. Uh, k. herbalism.com and you can also check out my other podcast episodes. Sharing is caring. Thanks for listening to this episode of Dogs Are Individuals. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review in your podcast app.
And don't forget, sharing [00:27:00] is caring. So if you love dogs or individuals podcast, share it with your friends and family who love dogs. This will help me so much. And remember, as a listener, I appreciate you much. Thanks to Resident Media, my podcast production team. This podcast is produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Mike Fry.
Any questions, email the show. Go to canine herbalist.com, click podcast, contact in the menu, and then fill out that form and I'll answer any questions here online. Okay, so thank you so much for listening to this episode of Dogs Our Individuals podcast, and I'm gonna talk to you in our next episode. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes.
It is not a substitute for veterinary care. This podcast doesn't constitute a provider patient relationship. As always, talk to your doctor, veterinarian, or healthcare provider first before starting anything new, and that includes herbs. I'm not a doctor and I don't treat disease or [00:28:00] prescribe anything.
I'm a traditional herbalist providing herbal support, educat. Only regarding any products I may suggest. The statements made regarding these products have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The efficacy of these products has not been confirmed by FDA-approved research. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
All inform. Presented here on the podcast is not meant as a substitute or alternative to information from your vet. Please consult your veterinary professional about potential interactions or other possible complications before using any product.
