Deconstructing Conventional

Dr. Scott Johnson: Beyond Pharmaceuticals - Overcoming the Incurable: How Plant Medicines Heal Without Harm

• Christian Elliot • Episode 56

Share episode

Send us a text

What if nature already contains the solutions to many of our health challenges? In this eye-opening conversation with Dr. Scott Johnson—naturopath, author of 28 books, and one of the world's foremost authorities on essential oils—we uncover how plant medicines can work with remarkable potency while avoiding the toxic side effects of pharmaceuticals.

Dr. Johnson's passionate journey began with his own diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis, a rare auto-inflammatory condition doctors told him would require lifelong medication. After experiencing stomach ulcers from conventional drugs, he discovered powerful herbal remedies that not only healed his stomach but eventually put his "incurable" condition into remission. When he excitedly shared this breakthrough with his rheumatologist, instead of curiosity, he was met with dismissal and anger—a moment that crystallized his mission to help others discover natural healing pathways.

We explore what makes essential oils unique in the spectrum of plant medicines. Unlike herbs or tinctures, these concentrated volatile compounds can penetrate cell membranes, cross the blood-brain barrier, and reach deep into the respiratory system. Perhaps most importantly, they maintain nature's complete formula rather than isolating single compounds, creating what Dr. Johnson calls "side benefits rather than side effects."

The conversation gets practical with specific recommendations for common conditions. For inflammation and pain, a blend of frankincense, copaiba and fir oils taken in a capsule has helped countless people find relief. For allergies, the combination of lemon, lavender and peppermint works through multiple mechanisms: peppermint as a bronchodilator, lavender as a natural antihistamine, and lemon supporting overall immune function.

Throughout our discussion, Dr. Johnson emphasizes that essential oils should complement—not replace—healthy lifestyle foundations. "No amount of taking an essential oil is going to override poor diet and sedentary habits," he reminds us. Yet when integrated into a holistic approach, these powerful plant extracts can dramatically reduce our dependence on pharmaceuticals and help us reclaim our inherent healing capacities.

Ready to explore nature's pharmacy? Discover how essential oils might transform your approach to health and healing while reconnecting you with traditional wisdom that modern science is only beginning to validate.

Reverse Any Chronic Health Condition in Three Steps - The Simplest Path to Healing You've Ever Seen

Support the show

NEED TO DETOX AND HEAL?

Speaker 1:

Hello everyone, welcome to episode number 56. Today's show is one I'm really excited to host for you, largely because it helped me clarify a few things about the world of plant medicines. My guest is Dr Scott Johnson and, like me, he is someone who got into the health profession because he was trying to get his own health back, and what he learned changed his life so dramatically that teaching others became a calling. Part of his story is that he had a rare disease that he overcame using nature as his pharmacy, so I'll let him tell the story of his recovery, including his run-in with an arrogant, belittling doctor who was dismissive of what Scott did to heal himself. To me, that was just a window into how defensive some medical doctors get when you question what is more or less the only two tools they are trained in testing and pharmaceuticals. And as Scott was telling the story, it hit me how lost so many doctors are without those two levers to pull. It's like they don't know what else to do to be a doctor if you don't want to take the pills they prescribe. Anyway, one of the things that I loved about this interview is how Scott was able to help me understand what I'll loosely call the spectrum of ways we can use plant medicines with increasing potency and precision, and to me, this episode built upon my earlier interviews with Jordan Gunderson, who's an herbalist, or Kim Rogers, who used to work in the medical field and now has a whole product line of tinctures that draw from nature's pharmacy.

Speaker 1:

In this episode, dr Scott and I talked at length about essential oils, which is as close as you can get to the drug world without losing nature's packaging and thus becoming toxic, which is essentially what the pharmaceutical world is a set of toxic knockoffs. If you listen to episode number two of my show, then you know that what we call conventional medicine today is really more of a hiccup in history. That only goes back to about 1910, and it is a system set up by monopolists who wanted standardization and patentable products, and that model is the foundation of modern healthcare, which I tend to think is an insult to the word healthcare. But I digress. So, as part of a serendipitous timing, I guess you could say relevant to this interview, I came down with an episode of pain a few days prior to recording this, but fortunately I had one of Dr Scott's books about essential oils and my wife has a boatload of essential oils. She's been into them for many years now. So we were able to reference his book, and my wife put together some specific protocols for this weird pain I was having in my low back and glutes, and it was just reassuring to know that I have a way to beat this without a pharmaceutical and I tell that story in the interview as well. So Scott and I also talked about various myths related to essential oils. We talked about the common problem of adulterated oils and a handful of precautions to be aware of, and we also discussed various ways oils can be used, from cooking to diffusing, to topical or internal use. We even talked a bit about combining various oils with DMSO, which some of you may be familiar with from my interviews with Herb Richards and Dr Robert Yoho. Stick around until the end of the episode and Scott gives some recommendations for people struggling with inflammation, pain and allergies and more. In many ways, scott and I simply scratched the surface of the topic of essential oils, but my hope is that I gave you the first principles to explore this world for yourself.

Speaker 1:

Hopefully this episode emboldens you with the courage to get familiar with the ways plant medicines are relevant to this episode. Essential oils can be a replacement of so many of the things we typically run to the pharmaceuticals for. So in many ways this episode kind of feels like reclaiming a lost wisdom or a returning of our agency to realize we don't have to outsource the management of our health to a doctor or a system. Like I highlighted in many different episodes of the show, there are so many effective and affordable things we can do to take charge of our health. So, if nothing else, just think of the number of doctor visits you could skip for yourself and your family as you get familiar with how to heal naturally and, most importantly, how to give your body the support to stay healthy. It is so empowering. So, for context, this episode is also a great example of the kinds of things we teach inside our coaching programs. If you want to work toward living a pharma-free lifestyle, check us out at HealingUnitedtoday. We are redefining the word healthcare To make getting into essential oils a little easier for you.

Speaker 1:

I asked my wife to put together a few links for the bundles of essential oils that Scott recommended in the show for allergies, for immune function and for inflammation of essential oils that Scott recommended in the show for allergies, for immune function and for inflammation. Because Scott recommended taking these blends internally, she included some veggie caps that you would just fill with the oils yourself, beyond Scott's recommendation. She also included a link to a family starter kit which contains 10 of her favorite essential oils, and you get that blend at a discounted price. As I was recording this, I also have some clients who started taking essential oils for sleep, and so I asked Nina to include a link for a sleep bundle as well. And lastly, she created a link for four oils for pain relief from that chapter of Scott's book, which are the ones she applied about three times to my low back and glutes to help me get out of pain just recently. So, as a little bonus for this episode, if you use nina's link, she is happy to get on the phone with you to answer any questions you may have. So look for those links in the show notes. In case you didn't know, the show notes are easy to find if you're listening to the podcast from within the healing united pma app, and you can find our app in the app store for those interested. I also included a link to where you can get some dmso if you want to experiment combining your oil blends with dmso and, of course, I will have links to where you can find scott and his books.

Speaker 1:

As you might appreciate, scott and I wrapped up this interview by talking about the importance of lifestyle and how there's no intervention that compensates for a host of bad habits. Friends, it is no one else's job to manage your health for you, and the the so-called healthcare system is not going to teach you how to not need the system To learn that. You will have to take matters into your own hands. But the good news is we have never had a better cornucopia of options to take charge of our wellness. It just takes a little courage and a willingness to learn and try new things. So if you want a naturally minded doctor, coach and community in your corner to help you speed up that process, check out our coaching programs. Maybe what you need isn't another specialist. Maybe what you need is a new approach to health and healing. Okay, last thing I'll say before I play the episode is that nothing in the Deconstructing Conventional Podcast is meant to be personal health advice or to substitute for the guidance of a trusted healthcare professional.

Speaker 1:

The content of each episode is for informational purposes only. Okay, without further ado, here is my interview with the prolific author, researcher and truth teller, dr Scott Johnson. All right, hello everyone. Welcome to today's show. My guest is Dr Scott A Johnson. He is a naturopath and an author of 28 books. Well done, Scott.

Speaker 1:

His life drastically changed when he was diagnosed with a chronic illness, which we will talk about in just a second. But after being unsuccessfully treated with Western medicine, scott completed exhaustive research and discovered potent herbs that benefited his health, and he kept his health condition in check without drugs. As a result, he is one of the most knowledgeable people in the world about the topic of essential oils. He has since spent thousands of hours studying natural therapies and is dedicated to helping people discover greater wellness naturally. Bravo, as I think you'll hear today, he has a knack for uniting the art of natural healing with some evidence-based science. So, scott, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me today, you bet. Thanks for inviting me to be on, christian, it's good to have you, okay. So let's start with what got you into this world of natural health. Tell us about the health challenge you had and how that got you to do the work that you do today.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you know my story's interesting, but I find it closely resembles many other people's journeys into natural medicine that they had their own health challenges and just wanted a better option than was available to them. And that was the same with me. In my early to mid-20s I was diagnosed with a condition called ankylosing spondylitis. Most people haven't heard of it because it doesn't affect a lot of the adult population it's estimated to affect roughly less than 1% of the adult population and what it is is a chronic auto-inflammatory so a little bit different than an autoimmune condition, but similar mechanism where the immune system's going awry and attacking its own tissues. It's just the part of the immune system that's gone awry is different with auto-inflammatory versus autoimmune, and the most common symptom of this is really a lot of pain, severe pain and stiffness in the back, especially after rest, and so waking up in the morning would be really one of the most challenging times, because you've already had a long period of rest. Generally your back can feel really painful, stiff. The other problem with this condition is it's very progressive, and when I say progressive, I mean that it can affect many different tissues in the body. It can affect your lungs and it can affect your heart, your eyes, other joints, and it's also one that tends to. If you do a drug route. It'll tend to respond to a drug for a little while and then all of a sudden that drug doesn't work anymore and so it starts to kind of override what the drug was doing. When I was diagnosed with that, I was put on your traditional starting or standard medication, which is a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug In my case it was indomethacin, and I was on that and it seemed like that was reducing the pain and stiffness that I was experiencing. But it wasn't too long after that, just a few months in that I started to have stomach aches and I was going OK. What's going on here? This is probably that dreaded side effect of an NSAID that it's eaten my stomach. And so I called my rheumatologist and I said hey, you know I'm starting to have stomach pain. So what do you recommend? Is there a different medication? And he said oh no, we don't need to switch your medications, we just need to give you a proton pump inhibitor, and that will stop the acidumatologist. And so he gave me the prescription.

Speaker 2:

I took the proton pump inhibitor for only about two weeks and it seemed like it was helping, and then all of a sudden, it stopped working. I started to have even more severe stomach pain, to where I would almost double over, and so I was like, okay, this is not working. And so I called him back and the office was like, oh well, maybe we can try a different medication. You know, we can give you some Zantac in addition to that, and that will help. And I was like, oh, this doesn't make sense to me. I mean, I don't want to be on drug after drug after drug that are trying to fix the previous drugs problem that it's causing.

Speaker 2:

And so I decided to do my own research and try and figure out something for my stomach, which I did find. I found a really great herbal remedy that worked well and it fixed the ulcer that I had in my stomach, and that made me fascinated with natural medicine. I thought, well, if I can do something about my stomach, well can't I do something about the ankylosing spondylitis too? Isn't there going to be a solution for that? That one was a little bit more complex and challenging, but I was able to. Through lots of trial and error and research, I found a group of herbs that also helped me with that, and I started to see big improvements and started to feel so much better and I was excited. I thought, man, this rheumatologist is going to love all this stuff that I found, because he'll be able to help more of his patients.

Speaker 2:

And so I waited until my next appointment and I took all of my supplement bottles up in a bag and I went to the appointment and I just kind of had that sitting on the side. I let him do all the tests that he does. They test your flexibility, your lung capacity. They obviously do the blood draws to look at how there's some inflammatory markers they're looking at, and kidney function and other things tests. And he goes man, you're doing excellent. In fact I would say you're above average for somebody who doesn't even have this condition. And so what do you attribute that to?

Speaker 2:

And I think he was expecting me to say, yeah, the drugs have just been working so well. And I said, well, actually I stopped taking all the medications that you had prescribed and I started taking these and I took out my supplements and was showing him and kind of telling him why I was taking them and what they were doing and what my experience had been. And I could tell that his demeanor changed. He had a facial expression, but I knew something had changed. But he let me finish.

Speaker 2:

And then, after I finished talking to him, he stood up and literally pointed into my chest and said if you won't listen to what I tell you to do and take the medications I tell you to do, then get out of my office and come back when you need me, because you will. And then he walked out the door and just left me sitting there. I was just in shock and so I thought I just sat there for a minute going did that just really happen? What is going on? And so I gathered up all my stuff and I walked out of the office and found my way back to the reception and where I could leave, and the receptionist says hey, we need to schedule you for your next appointment. I said no, I'm not coming back, and just walked out the door, and I have not been back since.

Speaker 2:

And so that gave me a passion for natural medicine to where I started to say I really want to help other people the same way I've been able to help myself. But it will take some education to do it, because I was doing research as a layperson who didn't really know biology, didn't really know the mechanisms, pathways, the targets on cells that I really needed to focus on. I was just trying to do things based on the limited knowledge that I had, and so at the time I was studying business management in college and that was my goal is to continue in business management and I shifted my education to study natural medicine and then ended up getting a doctorate in naturopathy, and so that's really what drove me to it was. It was a condition that I would not wish on anybody, but I consider it a tremendous blessing in my life because it shifted me down a path that is far more rewarding and fulfilling than what I would have been in had I stayed in business management.

Speaker 1:

Wow, what a story. I mean it sounds like in some ways it parallels mine. I didn't go the route you did. I went to a chiropractor who turned my understanding of structure and of nutrition and what just kind of taught me how the pharmaceutical you did. I went to a chiropractor who turned my understanding of structure and of nutrition and what just kind of taught me how the pharmaceutical world worked. And I just haven't looked back all these 20 something years later I I'm still in this work and it's that similar story that your healing kind of becomes your mission.

Speaker 1:

I love how you're um, that arresting moment of being poked in the chest saying it's just, it's haughty, it's hubris, it's just so many things mixed into. Do you think you're god? Do you have like it the the spell that some doctors are under to not be able to hear anything outside of what they're trained in. It's almost like an insult that you say actually the medicines weren't working but this did, and to hit such a wall of closed-mindedness is telling. So thank you for telling that story. Anything you want to add to it.

Speaker 2:

Well, I'd just say that that didn't end there. I have had other physicians who have sent me messages or even wrote reviews on my book, saying I'm dangerous Because I wrote a book about how to use what I've done to help put my ankylosing spondylitis in remission. Because I got asked that all the time People would find out I have the condition and they'd go you're not taking any medications. How did you do that? And so it would take a long time to explain, because it's not just simply taking the herbs. I made lifestyle adjustments, I changed the way I eat, I changed my exercise routine, I added stretching and strengthening and core exercises and these. So I changed so many things beyond just taking these supplements, and so it would take a long time to explain. So I finally put it in a book where people could just read it and they could figure it out and follow the advice that I have in there.

Speaker 2:

And I get messages from all over the world telling me I started this and I'm reducing my medication and I'm doing so much better, which is really some of my favorite messages to receive. But then, coinciding with that, I frequently also get messages in my inbox from physicians or healthcare professionals or bad reviews on my book, saying it's dangerous to not take the medications and you really need to focus on the medications. And just last week I had somebody who was in on my social media talking about I was a snake oil salesman and just trying to sell a cure and benefiting on people's pain, and I just think that these individuals don't know me at all if they think that's what it is. Um, because it's purely to help give people hope and another option to besides the drug pathway.

Speaker 1:

Man. Well, good on you for standing in the fire and taking some of those arrows so that other people can learn from your experience. It's I've I've had similar things happen and you just kind of shrug and go. Well, I can only help those who are willing and want to walk a different path, and my experience doesn't have to be yours. So good on you for continuing that work, all right, well, let's talk about the wide and wild world of plant medicine.

Speaker 2:

So until the.

Speaker 1:

Rockefellers came along in the 1900s and basically developed a petroleum-based model of medicine that even today rudely claims the title. Conventional Plant medicines were the medicines of history, so give the listener a sense of some of the history of the use of plant medicines. And when did essential oils come on the scene?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you know plant medicines. Like you said, they were the original medicine, and so when we talk about conventional medicine, yeah, conventional medicine is not really conventional. What we call conventional medicine today, chemical medicine, is really only just over centuries long you know history Whereas we have centuries and centuries of plant medicine that have been used. What I find really interesting about plant medicine is that our ancestors figured things out through trial and error and intuition and they just had to experiment and say, oh, this worked really well, or no, this didn't, or this made me sick, this made me feel good, and they figured things out. But how often science and now that we do in modern times validates what our ancestors figured out through trial and error and just their intuition. And we're just starting to explore and discover the mechanisms by which they knew it always worked, um, which that's something that always is fascinating me, as I I don't want to just know that it works, I want to know how and why, by what mechanism, because that just helps me better understand and, I think, use these plant-based medicines in a more real way, more effective and more safe. So plant medicines have been used really since the beginning of time. They were the original medicine. They were often just crude extracts teas they would boil plants in waters and drink the teas. They would make poultices out of them to put on topically. So that's a little bit just about broadly natural medicine or plant medicine Essential oils.

Speaker 2:

There's a little bit of a myth that they've been around for a very long time too. Traditional essential oils that are distilled or cold pressed from plants really haven't been around as long as people think, because there's discussions all the time about well, we found frankincense and we found peppermint in the tombs of the Egyptians that date back, you know, 2000 BC. So people say, oh, they used essential oils. Not really, they used what I would term as an aromatic extract, because they didn't use the distillation procedure to get these oils Instead to get the aromatic compounds, or they would soak them in wine or vinegar or something like that that could extract the aromatic compounds. So they were using crude aromatic extracts.

Speaker 2:

It really wasn't until about the 10th or 11th century that we really saw the distillation process in use, where we used steam and water as the extraction method. There is a little bit of debate because some actually make the claim that Avicenna, which was a physician back in like the first century that he may have used some crude distillation techniques that employed water and steam, but there's not as much evidence for that as there is in the 10th and 11th century where we really saw kind of the booming of distillation as a method to extract essential oils and get the aromatic compounds out of plants. So that's really when essential oils started to be distilled, we started to get true essential oils. It's the 10th and 11th centuries and then from there it just kind of took baby steps into. People started to explore their chemistry in greater detail, started to explore their properties, until the modern day where there's now thousands and thousands of studies on their properties and their chemistry that are really helping us to get to know essential oils at a deeper level.

Speaker 1:

Nice, okay. Well, let's define a term here. So what is an essential oil? I've always wondered is there such a thing as a non-essential oil? So is that a thing, or is it like what makes it essential? And define it a little more specifically so the listener can know what we're talking about.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and that is controversial in and of itself because there's not a real consensus. There are organizations, especially the aromatherapy organizations, which have put out definitions of what an essential oil is, and it's typically their plant extracts aromatic, volatile aromatic compounds that are extracted from plants using steam or hydro distillation, and then also cold pressing. Cold pressing is where we get our citrus oils from. They're not, they can be distilled, but they you're typically more commonly pressed out of the peel. So that's been kind of the accepted definition within the aromatherapy organizations and even some scientific organizations like the ISO, things like that, but that's not completely accepted universally. There are some very purist aromatherapists that say I don't even want to include cold-pressed essential oils, I only want anything that's been distilled, whether it's steam or hydro distillation. That's the only thing that should be considered a true essential oil, because it's going to be more focused on the aromatic compounds, whereas cold-pressing actually can bring in some waxes, some pigments and some non-volatile compounds that will come into the process. And then when you get into the scientific literature it gets really, really muddy, because they'll call an essential oil virtually anything that has an aromatic compound in it, and so you really have to look at their methods of how they extracted it to see if it really was an essential oil, because they may call an absolute which is extracted with like a solvent, which could be alcohol, could be any other solvent. They'll call that an essential oil in the literature. They'll also call other things, other extraction methods, essential oils.

Speaker 2:

One that is particularly growing in being called an essential oil is through supercritical carbon dioxide, and the reason is is because it's an inert substance and you can fine tune the settings of that to produce something that's identical nearly to an essential oil that's been steam distilled. That is called a CO2 select extract. So it's still considered an extract, but it's an aromatic extract that really does have very close composition or chemical composition to a steam distilled essential oil. In fact, when I made that claim and said you can actually produce what I would consider an essential oil like extract with CO2, I had an aromatherapy group that said no, that is not possible. And I said, well, I'll challenge you.

Speaker 2:

Then let's do an experiment and see if you can figure it out. And I took the composition of 10 essential oils that had been extracted from the same plant material with steam distillation or cold pressing and then also with supercritical CO2. And I gave them the composition and I said tell me which is which. And what I found was that these certified aromatherapists actually were able to determine which one was a CO2 and which one was distilled less than half of the time, which means it's simply a guess, because you can guess 50-50 sometimes. So they could not decipher which was the right, which was which. And so to me these CO2 Selects are very close to an essential oil in their composition.

Speaker 1:

Got it. What a fascinating world. Okay, so is it fair? Like? One of the words I was with was essence oil. It's kind of you're capturing an essence of a plant and it's more in the complexity with which nature designed it. Is that a reasonable way to conceive of what's different about these oils than, say, a tea or a tincture or some other way we could use the herbs?

Speaker 2:

A lot of people do call them the aromatic essence of a plant, but even that is not really 100% accurate.

Speaker 1:

Okay, well, let me ask it this way. So, basically, what differentiates? Because what I imagine? Tell me if this spectrum makes sense to you. There's this spectrum of now you can chew an herb out of the ground, or you could smoke something, or then you could crush it and turn it into a salve or poultice or something, but then you get to more specific extractions like alcohol, where you can extract more properties, and then, to me, essential oils is a step beyond that. Do I have that accurate?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the essential oils. Really, the best way to think of them is they're going to focus on the volatile compounds in the plant. Okay, Because although they can contain trace amounts of non-volatile compounds, the majority of the composition is actually volatile aromatic compounds.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and so that's the big difference. They're low weight and they're aromatic. So, for example, if I were to take a lemon and I were to distill the peels of it, that peel would actually have bioflavonoids in it and it would have some vitamin C in it and it would have pigments and it would have waxes. If I were to distill it, I'm not going to get any of the vitamin C, so I'm not going to have that. I'm not going to have any of the bioflavonoids. You may have some of the waxes and pigments, although distillation is unlikely to pull a lot of that over but I will have all of these aromatic compounds which are terpenes and other aromatic compounds.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So what threshold then, does a pharmaceutical cross that an essential oil does not Like, cause I know probably? I just even one of my other interviews about I think it was parasites or mold the person who thought of some of her products basically realized that pharma had just copied all these different things from nature and they changed it in some way. So where does an essential oil stop that keeps it from becoming a pharmaceutical, and what threshold is pharmaceutical doing that is different here?

Speaker 2:

I think the biggest thing is that the pharmaceutical companies are looking for one bioactive molecule out of that essential oil and they will just synthesize it and create a synthetic version of it and say there's our drug, because we now have the active compound out of the lemon essential oil and it's going to actually produce the effects we want. And essential oil actually doesn't have just a single compound. You can look at a really simple essential oil, such as a wintergreen or birch essential oil, and you may only have 12, 18 compounds in it total. But then you could look at something like a rose, a Roman chamomile, that are highly complex and you could have 250 compounds in there. And so there are these natural complex substances and each one of the compounds or constituents that are within that essential oil has its own properties. So when you put all of them together you actually have a additive synergistic and antagonistic or buffering effects that occur within a single essential oil and because of that each one of these compounds can act with different cell receptors, different molecular targets within the body, different pathways and even by different mechanisms, and so you actually have a greater response in the body from an essential oil because you have all of this complexity that's going on, not an isolated compound. Now, the other part of using just a single isolated compound is you are going to increase your risk of side effects, because that's not how nature intended us to take the citrus. It doesn't want us to just consume limonene, it wants us to consume the entire complexity, because sometimes there are compounds that are in there, even a trace amounts, that buffer the toxicity of the main compound so that we can actually have a greater response without the adverse effects. And I always say actually, essential oils have side benefits, not side effects, because you often get an additional benefit that you didn't expect by using it because of the complexity.

Speaker 1:

Oh, that's so helpful. Yeah, because I know pharmacists. They'll take one molecule. They'll say this to your point is active, everything else must have been irrelevant. And they'll concentrate that so disproportionately, beyond anything nature ever would have packaged. And when you interrupt the biology at that kind of level, yeah, of course you're always gonna have side effects. But it's great to hear you lay that out, because I hadn't been able to put it into those words yet. So well done. Okay, give me an example maybe, where an essential oil has an upside, so this more volatile organic compound has an upside that maybe, like your basic herbal formulation, some powdered or dried herbs wouldn't have.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there are actually a lot of unique properties in essential oils that give them a benefit. Okay, one is they are highly lipophilic in their nature, which means they're attracted to fats. They love fats. Well, guess what? Every one of our cells is surrounded with, it's surrounded with a lipid bilayer of fat, and so these essential oils are attracted to our cells. They can attach to those receptor sites on the cells once they're attracted there, or they can actually penetrate inside the cell and then interact with the organelles inside the cell. A great example of that is that there's technology now. That's a special laser microscope called laser scanning, confocal microscopy, and it allows us to look at these interactions under a cell or under a microscope and it visualizes or displays the interactions in color and you can see where an essential oil goes or what it does when it contacts a cell in this microscope.

Speaker 2:

And peppermint essential oil is known for being an energizing essential oil. One of the places it likes to locate within the cell is to your mitochondria, so it could be stimulating your mitochondria to produce cellular energy, and that's why it's an energizing essential oil. So that is one of the factors that I think that separates an essential oil from herbs. Another is because they're volatile aromatic compounds, they actually have access to privileged tissues that are more difficult to get herbs to. When you inhale an essential oil, some of it goes into the respiratory tract. The nice thing about essential oils is that they don't just stop at the upper respiratory tract like most things that you inhale. They actually can go all the way into the lower respiratory tract as well, so they can have a complete response in your respiratory tract that you can't get from many other solutions. The other thing is some of that inhales through your nasal cavity and actually goes through the olfactory system, the olfactory bulb, and into your brain. Because they're of the molecular weight and they're volatile, they can cross that blood-brain barrier, the filter, and actually enter brain tissue and when they're in there they can have positive effects in the nervous system and then downstream that's going to obviously affect multiple systems, because that's the control center right of all these other systems, and so this ability to get to privileged tissues is another thing that makes essential oils is kind of this ideal natural solution for a variety of things.

Speaker 2:

Those are two things that I think are kind of set essential oils apart from maybe their herbal cousins, but it doesn't mean you should just ignore them.

Speaker 2:

I actually think using both is the ideal way to use them, because there are certain things that need to be established from a dietary supplement or from what you're consuming for essential oils to have the best activity. One good example is essential fatty acids. We have to have enough essential fatty acids in our diet or through supplementation to keep our cell, that lipid bilayer, permeable and flexible, and so if you can maintain that, that means things can enter the cell and they can also exit the cell, those cells have to expel waste, just like we do, and then they also have to take in nutrients and other things that are going to be beneficial to their function. And if you don't have that already established in your diet, then the essential oils may not be able to work as well. If you already had a good diet and you were eating these fatty acids or supplementing it through, you know, a fish oil supplement or some other type of supplement.

Speaker 1:

Fascinating. So when I hear the word volatile, I think like your gas can in the garage. There's like big dangers, but what I'm picturing as you're saying this is something more like these oils are hungry to be able to be helpful, like they're volatile and they're ready to react and go do things that are beneficial, because there's a complex of molecules that nature has organized for us in a way that can be beneficial. Do I have that right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and people do get scared of the volatile that word but really that just means that they have the ability that when they're exposed to the air, they evaporate and turn into a gas really quickly. That's what volatility means in this case. So don't be scared of volatility. That's just the way that they turn into a gas when they're exposed to air.

Speaker 1:

Okay, fantastic. Okay, you made a comment in your book. I got your Big Pharma. Big Pharma doesn't want you to know about essential oils, which is a super helpful reference. But you made the comment that essential oils can unite the drug world of rapidly effective with the natural world's mantra of reduce risk of adverse side effects. So anything more.

Speaker 2:

You want to say about that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it kind of goes back to the whole conversation that we've already been having. Their unique properties make them very potent extracts that can have rapid effects. I've seen people that have been in emotional shock because they have an injury that I have had them just inhale some lavender and within seconds they're out of that emotional shock. So they can, they can act very quickly and and then they're highly potent. So they can um, they can have a significant activity within the the body. But yet, going back to what we talked about, they're not just an isolated compound. They've got all of this complexity. They are less prone to have a side effect for that complexity, but also because they're made out of the same things we're made out of. They still have the same carbon molecules and the same molecular atoms and structure and things, and so because they have the same, they're made of the same things we are, they're easily recognized and utilized by our body. They're not foreign to the body like a drug is, and so they can have activity in a positive way without having side effects.

Speaker 2:

Now, that being said, I don't want people to think I'm saying they can never have an adverse effect, because if you have something that can't produce an adverse effect. I would say it's not therapeutic in the first place. Anything that can produce a therapeutic effect can't produce an adverse effect. I would say it's not therapeutic in the first place. Anything that can produce a therapeutic effect can also produce an adverse effect. It's just how much you take, how often you're exposed to it, the method of exposure that determines whether you're going to have a good effect, positive effect, or a negative effect that you don't want to have. But the therapeutic window for an essential oil is much wider than it is for a drug, so you can actually take it more safely within that window than you could a particular drug.

Speaker 1:

Nice, I love that explanation. And a hat tip too. Like lifestyle as part of the wild card or other habits or exposures and related to, if the you know rare possibility to have a negative effect from it. But yeah, okay, great. Well then, this may be outside your scope, but do can you contrast essential oils at all with homeopathy? Is that a completely different paradigm?

Speaker 2:

yeah, you know they. They do share the similarity of trying to work with the body to support healing. That's one thing I really try and drive home with people, because people always say, oh, the essential oil healed me. No, the essential oil did not heal you, your body did the healing. The essential oil facilitated that healing by removing roadblocks or facilitating the body's own natural processes. Homeopathy does the same thing.

Speaker 2:

Homeopathy was something that was fascinating to me so I took some extra classes on it when I was completing my doctorate. It's pretty complex when you really get down to classical homeopathy and trying to get to the right remedy based on all of the things that an individual's constitution has, their current emotions, their experience, all of that going on. So the biggest thing is that they do have the same goal of stimulating the body's own natural healing processes. Outside of that, I'd say they're pretty divergent because essential oils are very potent extracts whereas homeopathic remedies are very dilute. Infinitesim are diluted down to where it's not going to trigger a negative response in the body but it's going to trigger a hemeing response. But there is a little bit of similarity in them and I've used homeopathic remedies with essential oils before, which I know they. In classical homeopathy they tell you not to, but I wanted to experiment and see and I found positive results using them together.

Speaker 1:

Well done, okay, cool, I like that. You're just like me. You're willing to experiment with things and find what works, and yet you got the depth of knowledge to back up. It's not just a blind stab in the dark. Here You're wielding these tools Well, good job, okay. So, scott, help us see this new paradigm. If you could snap your fingers and just implant into humanity all of your knowledge about essential oils, how would we think differently? Like what would we stop doing? What would we start doing, and how might we approach our habits or our health management differently?

Speaker 2:

I think, first and foremost, we would start using essential oils preventatively we know that a lot of then we can potentially just keep us from ever having to endure a condition, and so if we can focus more as using them just to maintain health, then that would make a huge difference in people's overall health health. Then that would make a huge difference in people's overall health. We have lots of essential oils that can help with metabolic function. Lots of essential oils can help with our inflammatory response. Just a couple you know, when you think of your metabolic function, we have lemon grass and cinnamon that you can use. Those two have compounds in them that are known to help support healthy insulin responses, good insulin receptor activity, so you have better insulin sensitivity, good glucose management and utilization in the body. And then you could look at lycopaiba and frankincense. Those are two great ones for helping to support a healthy inflammatory response. Because we do need inflammation.

Speaker 2:

Too many people think inflammation is all bad. We don't ever want to have it. Well, if you didn't have inflammation, you'd be dead. Because inflammation is required for the immune system to fight for innovators. It's what's used to heal wounds, and there are other things that inflammation is involved with as a normal process to keep us healthy. It's when it goes outside its normal window that it becomes problematic and can trigger maybe some of the conditions that people associate inflammation with. But that would be the starters. But that's, that would be the starters.

Speaker 2:

But then the second thing is when we do experience something. If you have a kit of a certain number of essential oils, there's a lot you can do at home. You wouldn't have to go to the doctor every time that you had a cold or every time somebody had a minor burn or a minor cut or something like that. There's a lot that you can do with essential oils just in your home. Many mothers use them, and fathers for the example, to help their children get through things that they're experiencing at home. We don't always need to run to the doctor. We need to return to where we take primary responsibility for our own health and we focus on using these natural solutions first, and then you can always go to a Western medicine if the natural solution has not produced the effect that you need.

Speaker 1:

Got it. So what would you estimate? How much drug use would we discontinue if we had a working knowledge of essential oils, like what would be left where they still have a place?

Speaker 2:

more than that, because there are so many essential oils that work by the same mechanisms, the same pathways, the same targets as a drug does, and so, if you know how to use them properly and you use combinations especially when we start blending and using combinations we get great responses that allow us to have the healing that our body needs, rather than continue to focus on a drug.

Speaker 1:

Right on. Well, I want to give you a shout out because, perhaps serendipitously, even between the first time we talked and recording today, I had a super stressful week on the home front and my body let me know. On Saturday it was done, so I had this. It's weird. I get this. Maybe you can tell me what it is. I get this raging pain across the sacrum and upper glutes. It's like writhing worthy, where there's no relief, there's no position that you can't think about anything else. Nothing makes it stop and I've maybe got it once twice in the last 10 years, but it comes, and the only thing that has ever given me any relief was Tylenol. I couldn't beat it with anything else.

Speaker 1:

And we have your book now and you have chapter by chapter of so many, like you know, allergies or pain or headaches or whatever in there, and so we just pulled it out and started referencing it. My wife has got this giant wall of essential oils that she has and we just started mixing and matching them and, sure enough, it enough. It totally took the edge off and made me able to sleep. It helped me calm down and by the next day I was better. It never has it gone that fast. So he's not crazy to say these oils can really do something dramatic if you know how to use them and combine them, and you happened to highlight a few my wife doesn't have, so we have more to order, but it works.

Speaker 1:

I'm just thrilled to be able to give people another tool to where they're not stuck going to something toxic like Tylenol that can do so many negative things to you. And if we can just understand and use nature's pharmacy in this potent form with a little measured amount of it my wife was able to there's. So, as you know, there's so many different ways to use it. You can put it on your skin, you can put it in a capsule and swallow it, you can do it orally, and we even combined it with DMSO and I found it to be remarkable. It gave me even more confidence that yep, nature's got an answer for this. I just need to do my homework or have reference guides like your book to be able to go and deploy what I know. So thank you for that and anything you want to add to that little story or I'm sure you've got dozens and hundreds like that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I could. We could talk a lot about that, but the reality is is it's it's really just focusing on what your body needs in order to allow the healing mechanisms that are already inside your body to work their magic. We have so many systems that are designed to keep us in a state of health. They want to keep us in a state of health, but the modern lifestyle is often contrary to it. We eat processed foods, we are sedentary, we're exposed to chemicals ubiquitously in our environment, and so there's all of these things that are getting in the way, and so, if we can have something that then is going to help facilitate those rather than be a roadblock, that's when the magic of essential oils really occur, and when I create protocols and put them in my book, it's based a lot on the mechanisms that they work by and making sure that we're targeting what is going to help the body in its own healing processes, and that's the goal is to just stimulate those healing processes. Let the body do its work.

Speaker 1:

Right on. Well, thank you for doing that, because it has personally helped me. I love it. Love it Okay. So what are some? Maybe some common myths about essential oils? I think you mentioned one that there's never any potential of overdoing it, or what other things might people misconceive about essential oils?

Speaker 2:

There's a lot. There's a lot of myths out there. Some of them have been perpetuated for many, many years. One of the ones that I continually see is there was a study published probably maybe more than a decade ago now maybe it's been even 15 years where some researchers claimed that if you used products that contained lavender essential oil, especially on your boys, that you were going to actually trigger gynecomastia in them, which is breast development, and so this study got published in one of the journals that many physicians and doctors read, and so they took it as gospel and ran with it. That study has been debunked so many times as pseudoscience that it's actually, in my opinion, it's to the point where it's unethical to keep sharing it, because you can look at how they confounded their own results based on the methodologies that they used. When you look at the products that they were claiming that actually caused this. Those products have actually now been tested and found to not even contain a drop of true lavender essential oil, so they don't even contain lavender essential oil, so they don't even contain lavender essential oil. They may contain synthetic chemicals that are found within lavender, like you can get synthetic linoleic acetate and you have linoleic acetate inside lavender. So they're taking these synthetic chemicals that they've produced to mimic what's found in lavender essential oil produced to mimic what's found in lavender essential oil. So that one is just very frustrating that it continues to be shared. It's shared by accounts that have major millions of followers, and so then everybody gets scared and throws their lavender away.

Speaker 2:

That's one, but I think another is that all essential oils are quality and pure, and that is simply not the case. I keep in contact with the some of the world's leading chemists on essential oils and, and the current consensus is that we're about 80 percent of essential oils that are commercially available are adulterated, and so that's a very high number. If you go to your grocery store or a big box store and you find essential oils and they're cheaper, much cheaper than what you would see elsewhere, that is a red flag that you probably don't want to use that essential oil because it's not going to be pure. And the problem with so much adulteration in the industry is that people can use these adulterated essential oils and then they do have an adverse reaction because they have synthetic compounds in them that the body is not used to, and then they think, oh well, I guess lavender essential oil is toxic, because that's what it caused to me.

Speaker 2:

No, it wasn't lavender oil that caused that.

Speaker 2:

That was a synthetic cocktail that was disguised as lavender that caused that, and so you have to be really careful with the essential oil quality that you are using.

Speaker 2:

You should find a company that's transparent in providing you the tests that they perform, and not only that, that performs multiple tests, because you can cheat or you can get over a GCMS analysis. If that's all they're doing to test their oils, you can fake that out so that people can go oh, this is a high-quality oil. You have to do chiral analysis, you have to do optical rotation, you have to do specific gravity, you have to do all of these other tests that are layered one on top of another to really truly ferret out and find if it's a quality oil or if it's one that we shouldn't be using. I mean, there's lots and lots of other myths beyond that, but those are probably two that I think everybody should be aware of, because you can't expect the good results from a poor quality oil. And, at the same time, don't be afraid of the fear mongers who continue to share this study that's been debunked so many times that it's just pseudoscience.

Speaker 1:

Okay, good stuff. Well, you're making me think of corollaries in the health or the food world. I know avocado oil, olive oil and honey are three products that they've cut them with so many other oils or put corn syrup or other things into the products. It's just another argument for know your farmer, know your source, understand where these things are coming from. Yeah, I had my wife actually had. We had, you know, this shelf or probably half a dozen, maybe a dozen different oils that she had got, I think, from a grocery store, and then she realized doTERRA was had better oils and so, blindly, one day she came over to me with one of each like this is lavender from wherever and this is doTERRA. And she had me smell them and try to guess which ones were the better oil. And every single time I'm happy to say my nose actually works.

Speaker 2:

I was able to go.

Speaker 1:

I think this is the good one and sure enough it was the doTERRA oil, so, yeah, there's something to even just your smell test can go a long way. So in your book about essential oils I mentioned, you have so many different categories of ways that you I think there's 19 or 20 different health situations where you can use an oil. So get practical a second. So talk to maybe the mama bear out there or somebody who's wrestling with something fairly common. What are some of the? Maybe if you had your top five remedies or your top five health situations, that, like this, is kind of a layup, I can easily address these or often has a pretty noted benefit. Talk about some of the things that you use it for the most.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So a lot of people find that they have an immune system that is hyperactive and that that also includes some inflammation in the body that's going on, and when you have those two things you often experience discomfort and aches as well. So if those things are going on, one of the things that I have found very helpful in supporting the immune system to be tolerant and also balanced in its activity but also to help support that healthy inflammatory response and reduce the aches that are associated with that is a combination of essential oils that you would put inside an empty vegetable capsule, and this is frankincense and copaiba and then a fir essential oil, so this can be Siberian or balsam fir. They're similar in their chemistry and they have the chemistry that I'm looking for for this activity. But people put depending on the situation and how well you know what you have going on in your individual situation, they'll put in somewhere from between three and five drops of each in the capsule, then fill the rest of the capsule up with fatty oil. That can be MCT, avocado, olive oil, coconut oil, whatever ingestible oil that you have there and you take that internally and that's been working really well for a lot of people. I actually had somebody once send me a video of them just in tears and talking about how that was the only thing that has ever been able to give them any relief and how grateful they were that I had published that in my book so that they could use that, that I had published that in my book so that they could use that.

Speaker 2:

Another thing I'd say is there's a lot of people who are concerned about their cholesterol levels. We know that lemongrass essential oil has been used in clinical research to help reduce cholesterol levels. It has a modest effect on it, but it did have an effect and it's certainly better than a statin drug. Lemongrass essential oil is about three drops that were put in that same type of capsule situation that they were taking and I was trying to remember I think they may have actually taken that twice a day. It may have only been once, but that's another thing that people could potentially consider.

Speaker 2:

For moms, often, you know, they get worried about kids who have an illness and so sometimes they just need a mild essential oil to help the kid get through it, help their immune system work, and one of my favorites for young children is diluted lemon essential oil, and I can just apply that along the spine and have them have the support their immune system needs to help fight whatever they're fighting at the time, and that's also just something that just provides a relaxation to the body.

Speaker 2:

The more relaxed state we can get our body in, the more it can heal. Anytime we're wound up or tight, there's tension, there's stress, our body is not going to work to its full extent, it's not going to be as effective in getting us back to homeostasis, effective in in getting us back to homeostasis, and so, when we can promote a relaxation response, that's super important for um, for that to to occur. Um, I don't know those. Those are a few that I think just come right off the top of my head on some of the things that that people can do in order to just have relief at home and take care of yourself and be responsible for your own health.

Speaker 1:

Yeah Well, and to, I guess, help moms or even our own family. We've learned and appreciate that a fever isn't something to be afraid of. It's something the body's doing, it's work. And so how do we help the body through a fever? If our kid has a cough or you know they're stuffy, like there are oils or there are other methods we have that can, to your point, just aid the body in being able to do what it's trying to do, and I love that there's some specificity with plant medicines that we can apply in these ways. So, um, anything about for allergies or maybe for, um, just pain levels that you maybe haven't mentioned yet.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the allergies. There's actually quite a bit for that. One of the common things that people love to do is take a combination of lemon, lavender and peppermint. Each one of those has a little bit of a unique activity in the respiratory system or with the immune system to help people who have seasonal allergies, and so that's typically ingested again in a capsule. You can just take them in a capsule.

Speaker 2:

Peppermint works multiple ways in your respiratory system. It actually stimulates a ciliary beat response, which basically is what your body uses to expel mucus and get it out of the respiratory tract, which you can often have a buildup of that when you're having allergies. It also is what's called a bronchodilator. So when you put peppermint on your skin, topically you feel a cooling effect, and that's because it's actually interacting with receptors that are in your cells that are called transient receptor potential, melastatin 8 or TRPM8 receptors. That triggers a cooling response in the body because it's sending cooling signals to the nervous system and the nervous system responds by cooling the area of the body because of that. Well, those same receptors are actually found within your respiratory tract, and so when peppermint goes inside your respiratory tract and interacts with them, it actually triggers a widening of your airways and so you can have a better airflow in and out of the lungs. We often see when people have allergies it becomes restricted or constricted the airways. They can also spasm, and so it's going to help relax that and allow that not to happen.

Speaker 2:

Lavender is used because it's actually a natural antihistamine. It does what's called mass cell stabilization. So your mass cells are cells within your body that contain these granules, and some of the granules that they contain are histamine. Histamine is actually one of those things that are released that triggers all of these characteristic symptoms of allergies the runny nose, the watery eyes, the itchiness. Is histamine triggering that? By stabilizing mast cells it basically lavender helps reduce the number of those mast cells that are actually degranulating and allowing the histamine to just travel throughout the body and cause these symptoms. And then you have the last one with lemon. Lemon just overall helps to support the immune system and its immune activity, and so it's kind of you get a combination of those three work really well when it comes to allergies.

Speaker 2:

You mentioned pain Topical essential oils actually are very effective as well. There is a whole host of essential oils that can work well. I mentioned peppermint and its cooling effect If you can cool that area of the body. That's like applying ice, and so it's going to reduce an ache in that area. Wintergreen is another one that it's high in methyl salicylate and so it can be very supportive. It's what's called a counter irritant, so it causes a little bit of irritation locally and so your body kind of focuses on that irritation there and it doesn't think about what's going on beneath the surface there, which is helpful. You can look at other essential oils, Like I really like Copaiba topically and I like the fur oils topically, and you can add other ones in, like anything that's high in camphor, like rosemary essential oil. There's just a whole host of essential oils that you can combine into a blend and put on topically and and have good benefits or good relief man, that's so cool.

Speaker 1:

It's just a cornucopia of options and it's just on us to try and whittle it down to things that work individually. It sounds like that would also help asthma as well. Is that accurate?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, especially the peppermint, because that's one of the characteristics of asthma is that spasming in the airway. So if the peppermint can relax the airways and open them, that can be really helpful.

Speaker 1:

Got it and you mentioned last time we talked that there's a few that you like to combine with DMSO. What would you suggest that this oil is even better if you put it with DMSO?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you know you can get synergistic responses when you combine certain essential oils with other botanicals that are topical. Dmso is one of the things that you can combine it with. I usually just use very, very small amounts of DMSO, but I'll add it to any of those oils that we just talked about wintergreen, copaiba, peppermint to have an additional activity. Dmso is known to drive deep into the tissues. It's kind of a driver product and it has its own relieving properties, so it just kind of triggers an amplifying effect when you use it with those essential oils. At least that's been my experience. I have a blend that I use for people who have really tough pain that they're trying to attack that nothing else is really working. That includes DMSO and it combines other things like Arnica and some St John's wort oil with several essential oils. That works really well.

Speaker 1:

Right on. Yeah, it's been a fun tool in our health kit and it's done so many amazing outside the box, unexpected things for us and our client base. It's just been remarkable how, when you can just take the tailwind of that, dmso pulls the oils with it or puts it in places where the body needs a little boost. It's remarkable and hopefully this, this episode, gives you all some some courage to go try these things. So any other ways that we haven't talked about of using oils We've talked about capsules, internally, topically. I guess cooking is another one. People, you can use oils for cooking too, yep.

Speaker 2:

Cool, yeah. The one thing that you need to be aware of if you use them for cooking is some of them are very strong, and so you may think, oh, oregano is a great spice that's used in, you know, my grandma's Italian cooking, and so let's put a few drops in there and then all it tastes like is oregano. So it's very, very strong. Sometimes all you need is a toothpick dip inside there and add that to your dish.

Speaker 2:

But I like to use essential oils in cooking and other foods that I consume. You know, I work out in the morning and after my workout I generally have a smoothie that has protein and some fruits and other things in it, and sometimes, when I have a chocolate protein that I'm using, I'll add some peppermint essential oil and it actually makes it taste like you're drinking a peppermint patty, and so it's nice. Or I'll add some tangerine oil and then it's like you're having that Christmas orange that you're drinking. It's like you're having that Christmas orange that you're drinking. I also will add like some lemon or lime to my chicken, and so just mix some of that in some olive oil with some other spices and you can go and apply that to your chicken that you're grilling or adding peppermint into some ice cream, that we make homemade ice cream, and so we'll have some ice cream, add peppermint and you have mint chocolate chip there. That's certainly better than what you're buying at the store.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic. I never thought to put it in ice cream or smoothie. So yeah, it's just. It's a fun world. I see why my wife has so many different oils now and she's a kid in a candy store learning all the different ways to use them. But it's. It is exciting and there's, it becomes just part of your lifestyle to think what oil would I use for that? Or where could I use that? She likes to anoint the kids heads when she prays over them, or she likes to put a diffuser in the room and and just in many ways change the mood of the room. It does wonderful things. There's so many great ways to use these oils. So is there anything significant? Maybe that I haven't thought to ask you about the world in general or specific, that I'll make sure everybody knows this.

Speaker 2:

You know, I think we've covered a lot of the things that I think are just so foundational for people to know if they really want to use essential oils. The one thing I would say outside of that maybe we haven't talked about, is people need to be aware of potential interactions between the essential oils they're taking and any medications that they're on. That's something that people frequently ask. There is potential, although I would say clinical experience says that they're not really very common. It's pretty rare to see an essential oil and a drug interaction, but they can occur, especially with something like a wintergreen essential oil. It's virtually 99% methyl salicylate, which is a compound similar to aspirin, and so that interaction between aspirin it can occur with methyl salicylate. In the wintergreen essential oil, or even birch essential oil, it's also high in methyl salicylate. So it's just good to be aware of those and make sure that you're consulting an informed healthcare practitioner or pharmacist that can say, okay, these are potential interactions. Most of them will have no clue, but if they don't have a clue, then that's when you need to do your own due diligence.

Speaker 2:

And in my book that's called medicinal essential oils, I have what's an appendix in the back. It's appendix G. You can flip to it and say okay, here's aspirin, here's all the essential oils that can potentially interact with that. Or I'm taking a diabetic medication, and so here is all of the things that can potentially interact with that. Or I'm taking a diabetic medication, and so here is all of the things that can potentially interact with that. So we're at least aware of those things and not just using them concurrently at the same time to where we might have a response. We don't want to have.

Speaker 1:

Great, I'm glad I asked. That was an important nugget. So thanks for saying that. All right, so as we start wrapping up here, I guess I wanted to maybe just zoom back out with you and kind of remind the listener of the importance of lifestyle, or of you talk about the difference between health span and lifespan and really just quality of life. So say anything you want to to the listener, just to kind of inspire them and remind them that their health is their job to manage. No one is going to manage it for you and it's on us to do the work to learn these things and just reap the benefits of it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm glad that we're ending with lifestyle, because it's so important that that's established first. Anything that we use beyond lifestyle is going to work far better if we're also focusing on our lifestyle, and all too often people just want to come into natural medicine and say I'm taking X drug, what is the substitute that I can take? And that's not really how natural medicine works. Natural medicine is really lifestyle medicine and we need to look at how are you eating, how are you moving medicine? And we need to look at how are you eating, how are you moving, what do you do to manage your stress? Are you sleeping well? Are you trying to minimize the toxins that are coming into your body? And then, once we get all of these foundational lifestyle things set, then we can use these natural solutions with far greater efficacy and we get greater results at a more rapid pace. And so it is so important that we kind of become our own family physician, our own personal physician, and take primary responsibility for our own health and make sure that we are getting our lifestyle in order and then we use these options.

Speaker 2:

That was one of the biggest frustrations when I first got into natural medicine. I was working with clients. Who was that? Come in and say, well, I just want you to tell me what I can take instead of this drug. And I said, well, we're not going to be able to work together. Then, because that's not how I work, we need to look at everything that you're doing in your life, because no amount of taking an essential oil is going to really override If you go to McDonald's every day for lunch and you're eating a box of cereal in the morning and you're, and then you just come and sit on your couch all night and watch Netflix. So if you don't, if you're not going to put in the work, you're not going to see the results.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, If you're not a participant in your own healing. The analogy I make is just kind of imagine putting good food in dirty sink, Like you. Just you can't get the system to heal when the water is inside. You is still dirty. We've got to clean that out and that's that's lifestyle. Are you pooping every day and multiple times a day, Are you? Are you getting the exit cleaned out so that the stuff that should go goes? And to your point, I have you reduce the influx of what's burdening you, and if we, if we lose that macro frame, then the rest of this is just majoring in miners. But once that's working, oh my gosh, these oils then become super effective. So any other thoughts you want to leave the listener with before we call it a day?

Speaker 2:

I would just say that don't lose hope, because I would say my condition is considered incurable and it's considered one that's going to be a debilitating condition that is going to affect your life significantly the older you get, and I'm an example of overcoming that through lifestyle changes and using the natural solutions that are helpful. So don't let somebody tell you that there is no hope. I have seen some pretty miraculous things occur in people's lives because they were willing to put in the effort to make changes and then use the right solutions, guided by the evidence that we have and also leveraging that healing art that has been around for so long.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, right on. Okay, well, it's been so good having you Tell people where they can hear about your newest book or where they can find your podcast or website anything else you want them to know about how to learn from you even more.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so most of my books. You can find my books at authorscottcom forward slash shop and then I'll have a link to all of the books. I don't sell them directly from my website, but that'll have links to either get them from Amazon or other bookstores. There are a handful of them that I allow people to purchase directly from my printer. My printer has allowed that so that you can go and get one, bypass the middleman and go directly to him. You get a little bit better price that way, so that's also on the website. You can find me on my social media channels. I do have a Facebook page. It's just Scott A Johnson on Facebook and then on Instagram it's Doc Scott Johnson, and then my podcast is Regaining Health and Humanity. So that's. You can find that on your streaming services. That's, you know, Apple, Spotify, all the major streaming services, as well as YouTube and Rumble.

Speaker 1:

Right on, you are everywhere. It sounds great, okay. Well, thanks for that knowledge, and I would just say, go get his books, people and follow his work. If this is an interesting topic to you, I do not know of anyone better to learn from. So thank you, scott, so much for being on the show today. It has been great having you.

Speaker 2:

Thanks, christian, it's been a pleasure.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Christian Elliot

Host