Learn True Health with Ashley James: 466 The Essential Oils Apothecary and What is Wrong with Drugs, Dr. Eric Zielinski

Dr. Eric Zielinski is back on the show to talk about his new book, The Essential Oils Apothecary. He shares some essential oil for headaches, which oils are photosensitive, and a recipe for an immunity-boosting and sensual master blend.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. We have back on the show today Dr. Eric Zielinski here to share with us some amazing information about essential oils, the powerful concentrated herbal medicine that you might not be aware of. He co-authored his latest book with his wife, Sabrina Zielinski, otherwise known as Mama Z, The Essential Oils Apothecary. I’m a really big fan of this book and I know you will be too. You can go to learntruehealth.com/eo. That’s learntruehealth.com/eo to preorder his book, or if you’re listening to this later on and it’s already out, then you’ll be ordering that book.

But if you go to that link, he gives you hundreds of dollars’ worth of his information for free, videos, all kinds of stuff, and recipes. He really just gives you so, so much. Now, you can always go and buy his books from other booksellers like Amazon. However, if you buy it straight from his website, he gives you a ton of fantastic freebies that aid you in your journey of increasing your health. And if you’re new to essential oils, welcome. You’re going to learn a ton today. And if you are a seasoned user of essential oils, you are going to be learning some great tricks to increasing your life in every area of your life by adding essential oils to it. I love the recipes that he shares today.

I also just recently interviewed his wife so I’ll be publishing that as well very soon. Now, Dr. Eric Z was on the show in episode 302 and 363, so you can go back and listen to episode 302 and 363. He talks about The Essential Oils Diet, and we get really deep into the safety of essential oils. How to safely use them because there’s a lot of controversy out there and if you use them wrong it could hurt you. Just like any herb, if used incorrectly can hurt you. So just like too much water could hurt you if you drink too much water, too much of a good thing is not a good thing anymore. So he does talk about how to use essential oils safely.

But I love that in The Essential Oils Apothecary, it will be such a powerful resource to have in your home to open up during times of needing more like first aid or triage, or sometimes with chronic things like sleep problems or hormone issues. You’ll be able to come to it in times of need and improve the quality of your life and your family’s life. Now, you can get his book by going to learntruehealth.com/eo. That’s learntruehealth.com/eo.

When I did interview him, this was back in early March. Since I did this interview—and he asked for me to wait until his book was on pre-order so it was a few months ago that I did this interview—a lot has changed in my life since. If you’re a regular listener, you’ll know I lost a child during labor. And then a few days later I got COVID. And then I immediately had to pack up, Marie Kondo our entire life, and move from a 2700 square foot house that we lived in for seven years into what is probably somewhere between 300 and 400 square feet.

We’re loving where we live now, I’m not complaining. I’m just laying out the foundation of how much has happened in the last few months of my life. That there’s been chaos and turmoil, and a lot of emotions to process. And I’ve taken what I learned in today’s interview and utilized it to help me. Because I know that this has helped me, I hope it’ll help you as well. So enjoy today’s interview. And please join us in the Facebook group, Learn True Health Facebook group. I would love to see you there. Also, please share this episode with those who care about especially your friends who use essential oils as they will love the information that they learn from Dr. Z. Enjoy today’s show and go to learntruehealth.com/eo.

[00:04:35] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 466. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show, Dr. Eric Zielinski. Dr. Eric, you were here in episode 302 and 363. You have a library of wonderful books that you’ve published. And you and your wife do this together, coming up with these amazing recipes. You’ve taught how to use essential oils in different ways—safely always—in ingesting them sometimes, in our cooking because it’s a form of herbal medicine. But it’s a very concentrated form of herbal medicine so we need to be careful. And you teach the safety of that, you teach how to make sure that we’re getting the quality essential oils, and what to look for in different brands. I love that you don’t align yourself with one specific brand because that way we know that we can go out there and look for what you say to look for.

So there’s so much we can learn from Dr. Eric. And today you’re here to talk about your latest book coming up, The Essential Oils Apothecary, which I’m particularly excited about because you take it into chronic illness and disease and many other ailments. Going really deep into how we can heal the body and using this specific type of herbal medicine. For those who haven’t really experienced essential oils, I think that the atmosphere or the idea that they’re just smelly oils, that they’re like spa day smelling oils. And I don’t think that a lot of people truly understand their intense healing properties. Very, very, very concentrated healing essences of plants.

Maybe you could just start off the interview, and you have shared your bio in the past interviews so listeners can go back and listen to 302 and 363 to get to learn more about you. But I’d like to start off, for those who don’t know deeply, have a deep understanding of how healing and powerful central oils are, well essential oils aren’t just a fun smelly spa day thing. It’s a concentrated form of herbal medicine. But can you explain why essential oils have such strong healing properties?

[00:07:10] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Of course. And first of all, thank you for having me. It’s my privilege and sincere pleasure, because a) I love you, you’re the best. And I am so proud of you. I mean, you’re doing such a great job. And the segue into your question is, I love how you continue to deliver to your community, and that really is the essence of what we do and what the importance of the literature continues to show about essential oils.

I mean, traditionally speaking. I mean, plant-based medicine since the beginning of time. Okay, I get that. And aroma therapists have been using them for ever, in certain ways. But like you, we, in my space as non-branded evidence-based essential oil researcher, this is cutting edge where researchers are today looking at how plant-based volatile organic compounds—volatile meaning they readily evaporate, organic meaning your carbon-based, compound meaning that there are a ton of chemicals like 200 to 300 different chemicals in the essential oil, right? Like D-limonene, pinene. I’m not talking about bad stuff. I’m talking about actual chemicals that are good for nature.

So it’s cutting edge research, and so we have this tradition where before the advent of the antibiotic, what did people use? I mean, I don’t know. I wasn’t living back then. I mean, think about that. People don’t even know. Most people alive today don’t even know what life’s like without antibiotics. The antibiotic came around in the mid-40s, and it was the solution to basically every infection. You can basically take what we see in nature that we know that by the way, this is pretty cool for you history buffs out there, front line medics combat medicine World War I, World War II, you open up their medicine kit you’d find essential oils.

[00:09:17] Ashley James: Which ones?

[00:09:18] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Lavender, you’d find oregano, you’d find thyme, you’d find tea tree. And you know what you’d find? You’d find the ones that were indigenous to their culture, like Australia, eucalyptus and Tea Tree, America, you’d have peppermints and some of the other herbal oils. You’d go to France, obviously lavender, right? You go to Italy you’ll get the citrus oils. That is the key to a lot of this is throughout the history of time, people always used what was available to them because they didn’t have Walmart. They didn’t have airplanes shipping plants that were not indigenous to their areas.

So when you’re looking at true healing, when you’re looking at true abundance of health, it really starts in your backyard because your biochemistry matches the biochemistry of the soil and the plants, and there used to be this wonderful harmony. We kind of mess that up a little bit. But I enjoy traveling and I enjoy mangoes and things that don’t naturally grow in Georgia. But what we have here is this concept that we have what we need in nature. So at the end of the day, they work because that’s essentially what we interact with at a biological level.

And so, I’ll leave you one with one little quick analogy, as I’m thinking through this, I’m sorry. I’m thinking like well, I don’t get it. Well, what do we think our ancestors used for pain before Advil or Bayer? I mean, when you go through different plants and when you go through different solutions, you would have chemicals that people realize, oh this is kind of anti-inflammatory. They just knew, oh, it just made me feel better. And when you’re looking at, for example, the willow tree, our ancestors used willow bark and they used to make a paste out of it and a salve out of it. Well, when you extract the chemicals in willow bark, there’s a salicylate type of chemical in it in the salicylate family.

Well, if you manufacture it and you put a shiny white pill on it you can call it aspirin. And that’s essentially how every drug is today, up until now, the different technology that they have. Up until recently, every drug on the market had some basis of the chemistry that they find in plants. It’s not like a chemist would just invent the chemical structure in her head. I mean, you had to base it off of something that you knew worked because that’s how the body works.

The body has receptors around cells, and the body has neurological impulses that could be triggered based on the chemicals that it interacts with. The food and the things that are in the air like those volatile organic compounds that are being emitted from the trees. And all of it just makes sense at the biological level. Well, that’s the basis for medicine. And so, bam, that hit me like a ton of bricks several years ago, that’s when I literally transformed my medicine cabinet, and that’s when the symptoms went away. That’s when I started feeling better in every area of life because I wasn’t using toxic substances to manage things anymore.

[00:12:41] Ashley James: So if someone’s in pain, let’s choose a headache. Maybe it’s a tension headache, for example, what essential oil or blend of oils would you go to?

[00:12:55] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Wonderful, wonderful. I’ll give a quick list because they all work depending on how you respond to it, and I think that’s key. I want to preface this whole talk because I know we’re going to drop a lot of cool little truth bombs and recipes and things. We are individuals. So I’m a 41-year-old Caucasian whose ancestry is from Poland. My biological makeup is uniquely distinct, and the melanin on my skin, the way that my skin interacts with the sun, and the way that my skin interacts—which is key because this is topical we’re talking—is uniquely different than a 75-year-old, let’s say, African woman from Kenya. Knowing that we need to find what works for us.

So like a doctor practicing medicine to figure out okay, which concoction of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery is going to help this person, we practice essential oils or aromatherapy. So that to say, here’s my wonderful list off the top of my head because they’ve worked for us and countless people.

First, something menthol-based like eucalyptus or peppermint. One oil specifically that comes to mind is rich and D-limonene, and no one talks about it in relation to pain, but that’s orange. Orange has a profound anti pain effect, but it also helps with depression, helps with anxiety, and helps boost different moods. It’s wonderful. Copaiba. Copaiba is rich in beta-caryophyllene. Beta-caryophyllene is a chemical—again, plant-based chemical—that triggers the endocannabinoid system. It works just like CBD, so it has a CBD-type of pain relieving property. A lot of folks swear that Frankincense is the solution to everything but death, but I’ve heard that frankincense because it’s inherently anti-inflammatory can also help.

What is the cause of your pain? If the cause of your pain is typically speaking an inflammatory cause, then you can find a number of oils that will work.

[00:15:03] Ashley James: I love that. I love that idea. When someone has more melanin in their skin, they have darker skin, how does that affect their absorption of essential oils?

[00:15:17] Dr. Eric Zielinski: You know what, I wish I had a direct answer because I have not seen any research on that. I do know that the photosensitivity of essential oils greatly depends on how the essential oils interact with the UV rays and how that gets absorbed in the skin. So inherently, someone with a lot of melanin in their skin, you don’t have to worry about sunburn per se. You don’t have to worry about exposure because through ancestry you’re in sub-Saharan Africa and you have that natural resistance.

What I posit to people when I’m proposing is that for people that have sensitive skin, especially Scandinavian people, you have to be careful that you need to dilute essential oils potentially more than someone who has like, I don’t say thicker skin, but skin that isn’t as sensitive. Again, it’s a generalization and I know we can’t generalize when it comes to healthcare, but the theory would be that someone might need to have a stronger dose when they apply topically, and they don’t necessarily have to worry about photosensitivity like other people. And that brings up a whole nother topic.

Who’s talking about putting on bergamot oil and not going outside? That is a known risk. People are burning themselves. There was a documentary on Netflix that we were recently featured in, and part of the story was this poor woman who got like—I forget what it was, forgive me—third degree burns because she applied essential oils and ended up interacting with, I believe she was in a tanning bed. And the thing is that there’s a chemical in bergamot, bergaptene. Well, it kind of makes sense, bergaptene, bergamot. That exemplifies the UV rays and that could cause extreme burns on people.

So, again, depending on the melanin content, that is not a concern. But when it comes to the therapeutic benefits of it, I can’t show one way or another, but I do know it does affect safety risks.

[00:17:28] Ashley James: So, if people of different skin tone we’re using essential oils at night—before they go to bed, for example—the dosage wouldn’t matter? It’s during the day when their skin is going to be exposed to sunlight certain essential oils can react with UV rays, is that what you’re getting at?

[00:17:48] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yes. This is quite frankly hotly debated in the aromatherapy community, and I have my own take on basically let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. There’s balance in everything. Maybe we’ll talk about ingestion because I have a dozen plus capsule remedies straight from the research trying to help people balance blood pressure and blood sugar for crying out loud, but aroma therapists will say I’m committing blasphemy because I’m improperly teaching how to ingest oils.

As controversial as ingestion is, the same thing is, okay, what do we recommend to people? So here’s the bottom line, and this is coming straight from Robert Tisserand’s Essential Oil Safety Manual. The key here is primarily undiluted, aka neat essential oil use. Now, that right there is full concentration of oil. For 99.9% of all your topical preparations, you need to dilute your essential oils. It just makes sense. Here’s the thing, I’m as natural, and we talked about this right before we just went on. I’m as natural and granola. My wife delivered our babies at home in a hot tub. We’re those people. We are the natural granola family.

[00:19:05] Ashley James: I think that’s normal, by the way. That to me just seems normal, not extreme or crunchy. And going to the hospital when you are healthy, your baby’s healthy, and there’s absolutely no risks, going to a hospital seems just not normal to me.

So in my mind there’s a scale of what’s normal and healthy and what’s abnormal and not healthy. Going through a drug every time you have a symptom is not normal and not healthy, to me. To other people, to mainstream society, that is normal. And I’ve said this before on the show, if you want to live like a statistic—remember, one out of every three people will develop cancer in their lifetime, one of every three people are obese, have type 2 diabetes, or are about to have type 2 diabetes, have high blood pressure, or cardiovascular disease. I mean, the top killers are chronic disease, cardiovascular, and cancer.

Look at what people are suffering from and dying from. If you want that, if you want to be a statistic, do what everyone else is doing. If you don’t want to be a statistic we need to be the salmon. We need to examine everything and examine our belief system and go, why is it “normal” to take a drug like aspirin instead of ingesting a little essential oil or rub a little essential oil on me? Why is rubbing an essential oil on me considered crazy, but taking a synthetic drug that can have side effects and deplete the body of nutrients “normal”? Why is it “normal” and accepted to go to a hospital for a healthy birth rather than do it at home for a healthy birth? In which, less interventions will occur, and there are many studies worldwide that show greater successful outcomes for both mother and baby if you can avoid a hospital.

Now again, that is not to say if you have complications, yes, we want emergency medicine available to us. The problem is the moment you step into a hospital for a healthy birth, you are going to get interventions that cascade into more interventions into more interventions. That’s a whole other interview right there.

But this is it. If you want to have different health, it all starts with your mindset. It all starts with you questioning the reality you have been brought up in. Questioning the reality that we’re taught is normal by the mainstream. We have to question everything. And we have to go wait a second, why is it that I blindly have accepted this my whole life? Why have I blindly accepted that the pediatrician gets to do this and not that? Why am I accepting that this is the way it is?

And instead, question everything, do the research, learn from doctors like Dr. Eric Z because man, you look like an extremist to some people, and yet your entire family—now five beautiful children and your wife and yourself—are of peak health. We all want to be as healthy as you guys, and we’ve got to start by questioning the decisions that we make and the belief system we have around health. And I know my listeners are really awake to this that’s why they’re here listening to you.

I myself had a very bad burn, not from essential oils but from putting citrus on my skin. My parents and I were in Mexico many years ago and we squeezed some limes in our hair because we were like, oh, we’re going to bleach our hair in the sun. Blood rushed to the surface of our skin and we got really bad burns. We actually had to be put on bleach cream, believe it or not. I was like a teenager and didn’t question that, but the skin doctor said we’re going to end up with these big birthmarks that would just basically turn brown and be there for a really long time if we didn’t.

And he said, yeah, the skin and UV react to citrus, so you can’t do that. You can’t just put citrus because it was like going down our face and we didn’t realize it. And that wasn’t concentrated like essential oils are concentrated. So I can only imagine that we have to be really careful because this is medicine. Just because it’s from a plant doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its own set of side effects, right? However, the side effects from aspirin can be far greater.

I have a friend who had a really bad abscess in his tooth. It was like a Friday and the dentist couldn’t see him until Monday. So he started chewing on aspirin like it was candy and by Sunday he went blind. I remember him calling me being like, I can hardly hear anything. He lost his vision and he started to lose his hearing. And I’m like yelling at him, stop taking the aspirin. He had given himself aspirin poisoning.

A Naturopathic friend of mine explained, this is Dr. Megan Saunders, she’s been on the show a few times. She said, willow bark, if you take willow, let’s say you make a tea out of it or some kind of thing that you’re ingesting, there are components like there are thousands of chemicals like you’ve mentioned in a plant. So willow, if you were to ingest willow bark, you get to a point if you take too much of it, there’s something in willow bark that makes you vomit it back up.

There’s safety mechanisms in nature, not with every plant because some plants are poisonous and toxic to the body. But in certain medicinal plants, if you don’t extract and make a drug out of it right, if you just have it as in its whole form, it won’t let you over consume it. Whereas when they take aspirin, they remove those nature’s safety mechanisms from it so that you can take a concentrated form, which is potentially life threatening.

So, with essential oils, we’re left with something far safer, and yet I love that you start off this conversation with the things we really need to be careful of because someone who’s never used essential oils can douse themselves in it go out in the sun, get a third degree burn, and then say essential oils are BS and never use them again. And I’d rather everyone be safe. So thank you. Thank you for saying, yes, we have to be careful. These are extremely concentrated forms of plants, so you’re not just taking bergamot like you’re eating a bergamot. You’re actually eating pounds of it if you were to start taking the drops. Maybe you could explain concentration a bit.

[00:25:59] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Well, exactly. Your analogy was perfect with willow. I mean, that was the danger of consuming a natural compound in its whole form poses itself if you overdo it, and then when you concentrate it, that’s why wintergreen can be toxic when you consume it in its whole form because of the same chemical compound.

Circling back to the photosensitizers, for those people who want to take notes and who are really diving deep here at this point, I want to give you the list from the book of those oils that are phototoxic. And just a quick, quick summary of it, the bottom line is I’m not concerned about using oils and interacting with the sun. I have found that, as a rule of thumb, if you’re going to put potentially photosensitizing oils on your skin, always dilute them to about a 2% dilution.

What’s that? Fancy way of saying you got 600 drops in an ounce. So start with an ounce of a carrier oil, like olive oil or coconut oil and 2% of 600 is 12, so you need 12 drops of essential oil added to one ounce of a carrier. That’s a highly diluted 2%. If you use your 2%, that’s our body care by the way. That’s what we use every day for just our day-to-day, our moisturizer. And once we anoint our kids before we kick them out to school, we douse them up with some vanilla and orange and they smell like a Creamsicle and they’re happy. The teachers love them because they’re like a walking diffuser.

So you start with your 2% and—this is key—avoid direct contact, it’s a good idea, for about an hour. And here’s why I say that because some aroma therapists say like you mentioned, at night is it fine for the next day? Here’s what we see. Your skin will start to absorb because essential oils are transdermal. They’re lipophilic hydrophobic, fat-loving, water-hating, volatile organic compounds. Your skin will absorb them immediately. There’s going to be very, very little residue after an hour at that point. They’re either going to evaporate out because they’re volatile or they’re going to seep into your bloodstream, which is cool.

But here’s the list of oils you need to be concerned about and I’ll start with yours. I was going to read alphabetical, but lime. Lime is a photosensitizer. So is angelica root, bergamot like I mentioned, bitter orange, cumin, grapefruit, lemon, and rue. It’s something to keep in mind. I think dill. I don’t know why I don’t have dill. I have to go back to that. I think dill as well. I’m going to put dill with an asterisk, but not many people want to smell like dill. So anyway, you don’t have to worry about that. That’s the list. That’s the list right there that we know and this is traditional aromatherapy.

[00:28:51] Ashley James: You bring up dill and I just have memories of my son. He had colic really, really, really bad when he was a baby and we would dilute dill and massage his tummy with it to help because it was one of those safe for babies. You have to be careful with babies. Can’t do any kind of peppermint or menthol, which I was surprised about. Because it liquefies the mucus and then they don’t have the ability to cough it back up. But dill was one of those safe ones, and it gave him relief. I just remember. Anytime I smell dill, I’m brought back to that time of massaging a tiny baby tummy and trying to soothe his colic. Why do you put orange and vanilla on your children?

[00:29:38] Dr. Eric Zielinski: I don’t know anyone, I’m not kidding, I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t like that smell. I mean, this is the Dreamsicle Creamsicle smell.

[00:29:45] Ashley James: Okay, it smells good. Is it because it’s antiviral? Is it because it calms them and makes them so they’re better at learning? Besides the fact that they smell good, what is your parental reason behind it?

[00:30:00] Dr. Eric Zielinski: I mean, believe it or not, there is the element where the happy smell produces a happy response, and that is proven. I mean orange is a proven antidepressant. So yeah, it’s rich in D-limonene, it’s anti-inflammatory, it stimulates the immune system, it helps balance your mood.

Vanilla is wonderful, it’s calming. It’s not a sedative per se, but it really helps balance people and it also balances the aroma. It blends well. And that’s the other thing is, when we talk about aroma therapy, there’s a known concept of creating a synergy blend. And this is something that we need to keep in mind. Again, I found that. I found that orange and vanilla, and again I think there’s a reason though. There’s a reason why dream creams, the Dreamsicles, or the Orange Julius is when you look at traditional food recipes too, this is a known synergy. It just tastes good. It just smells good. But also, instinctively, it does well for the body like compound things.

So yeah, orange is good by itself and vanilla is good by itself, but combined together it’s like wow, it’s like superheroes. When you combine the power of superheroes together, for us we’re a Marvel family, that’s when all the superheroes can prevent global domination. But by him or herself, a superhero is limited. So when you look at aromatherapy blends, there are known synergistic effects that happen. And I want to point out one thing. I know we can talk because we got a little extra time than other interviews that like, you got to stop at 30 minutes. It’s so hard to get everything in 30 minutes. But here’s the problem with drugs, all right.

[00:31:47] Ashley James: Can I make that the title of the show? Here’s the problem with drugs. All right, we’re going off on this tangent. It’s going to be a four-hour interview. Here’s the problem with drugs. I’m sorry, I just love that.

[00:32:00] Dr. Eric Zielinski: You can’t fraction out a chemical and expect it to perform in a desired effect when it’s out of context. Chew on this for a minute. Here’s what we found. Again, let’s go to D-limonene, we talked about it a lot. But, limonene antidepressant, limonene anti-inflammatory, shown to kill cancer cells.

Research has shown that when you extract limonene, even if it’s “natural form”, it will not have as potent and therapeutic of an effect as if you were to use orange oil in its whole form. And that’s what drugs are based off of. They take a chemical that they know like menthol, like the salicylates like you mentioned from willow, and like, okay, this chemical is the main chemical that does this main desired result. Let’s build a preservative effect around it and let’s create a whole system based off of this one compound, but it’s out of context.

[00:32:58] Ashley James: And then patent it. Make a chemical and patent it so we can make money. I mean, it has to be synthetic enough to be patented because you can’t patent nature.

[00:33:09] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Exactly. So that’s why oils work the way they do because you’re looking at a cornucopia of 200 to 300 chemicals in one drop.

[00:33:19] Ashley James: That all synergistically works together. This is like Mother Nature, God intended. I always want to go super spiritual when we talk about healing with plants. I always have this urge to go somewhere spiritual. I know that there are listeners out there who don’t relate to that, maybe atheists, and I in no way mean to put them off. Because I think some people go, well, if you’re not talking about science, then I don’t want to hear about it.

There’s so much science in this that Dr. Z can talk about the science all day long. And let’s just for one minute go somewhere, just an appreciation for nature. It is so beautiful and miraculous when you look at, when we examine these herbs, the healing properties, and the hundreds of chemicals that work together that have the synergistic effect that help the body kill cancer, decrease inflammation. All essential oils have antimicrobial properties, some are more than others. I’m just guessing, you know more than I do, but lavender would be less than oregano, right? But oregano is kind of like a nuclear bomb for certain microbes, right? Whereas lavender is something gentle you can use on a baby. But they all have antimicrobial properties.

When I was a teenager, my summer job I worked at a holistic spa. I was the front desk lady every summer. I just love this job and I got really involved in studying all the things we sold because it wasn’t like a bunch of face creams, it was a bunch of essential oils. It was a bunch of herbs and stuff like that. My boss was super and still is. She’s no longer my boss, but she’s still super into crunchy granola hippie stuff like the healing stuff. So when you came into her spa, it was about how we can heal by not putting chemicals in our body, and this is back in the ‘90s. Nowadays it’s a little bit more accepted, but back then, it was kind of revolutionary. As you walk into a spa and you’re having more of a health experience.

And so she gave me a bunch of books and CDs to study, and I was about 14 or 15, essential oils and it was all new to me. I’m like, oh, these all smell good and some of them don’t smell good. I’m studying it. I think I might have told this before on the show, but one day I wake up and I have a stomach flu, just bad. It was fever, vomiting, and other symptoms that are in line with the stomach flu, and I couldn’t go to work that day.

So my mom called my boss, they were friends. My boss says okay, Cheryl, come on over. I’ve got something for Ashley. And so my mom comes home with a bottle of lavender and a bottle of peppermint from the spa. She makes a pot of hot water and puts one drop of peppermint in it. She gets about an answer two of olive oil because that’s the only oil we had in the house at the time and she puts a few drops of lavender.

This is what my boss told her to do, she rubs the lavender on my stomach and my chest. She tells me to smell, to sniff, and to sip the tea, which was ingesting the peppermint essential oil. I did both. I immediately fell asleep. I stopped vomiting, I immediately fell asleep, and when I woke up my fever had broken, and my gastrointestinal issues were gone. My stomach upset was gone. I felt like I had been through something, but I no longer had the stomach flu—gone.

From that day forward I was in love with essential oils. I began to study feverishly. Anyone that came in the spa was going to buy an essential from me because I was like telling them all about how amazing they are. The fact that they absorb through the skin and go in between the cells in the lymphatic system. That’s why when you get an essential oil massage it’s a lymphatic massage, typically. They help the cells communicate better between each cell. They help kill microbes, but they don’t kill good microbes like good gut bacteria. Oh just on and on and on and on learning about how amazing essential oils are and how we can incorporate them.

But then I had an experience where we got so passionate about them we diffused them eight hours a day and the diffuser was right beside the aesthetician. And the aesthetician came in a few days after we were just constantly adding essential oils to the diffuser because we thought, if a little is good, a lot is better.

She came in and her entire right side of her body, which was the part of her body that was closest facing to the diffuser, was one giant pimple, was one giant breakout. She told me she felt stoned. She goes, I feel really weird. I feel stoned. And this is before we opened up the spa that morning. She goes, I have to tell you that I had a really shady past. I used to be involved in street drugs, and I kind of feel like I’ve done heroin, meth, or something. I feel like that.

And she and I talked it out. And again, I’m a teenager. I don’t know as much as I know now, but her and I figured out that we were diffusing way too much essential oils, it caused her to have too much of a detox reaction too quickly and the street drugs that were still sort of stuck in her system were kind of like releasing and her liver couldn’t handle it and her skin couldn’t handle it. We looked more into it and realized we only should be diffusing once a week. Not every day 10 times a day.

So, that had me go wait a second, there’s more to this. There’s more to essential oils than just their fun smelling oils you can do as much as you want. We have to really be careful. So again, I love that you’re bringing up cautions, but I don’t want people to get so afraid they don’t use them.

[00:39:28] Dr. Eric Zielinski: No, no. That’s what we do with our kids. I mean, instinctively, my wife came up with this orange and I guess the anchor of this part of the talk is this orange vanilla blend because her mom struggled through postpartum depression, and she didn’t want that to happen.

So my wife always loved that smell and that was like her anchor. And that’s why it kind of just became like this family blend. But you know, oftentimes the things that we do, and I think this is kind of bringing back like you mentioned earlier about spiritual piece. What about the intuitive piece like, there’s something known as the organoleptic evaluation with how we interact with the essential oil, and it really focuses on the five senses, but the sixth sense is part of this. How do you perceive, what are you intuitively yearning for? Our family intuitively has been drawn to this. This is how things work. I mean, I’ve seen this over and over again with nature and plant-based medicine.

A few years ago. A study was done on roughly 80 people in a hopeless situation. Now, how relevant is that today? I don’t know of anyone who has not had a little bit of hopelessness in the last year and a half or so depending on what persuasion you are. Whether it’s political, whether it’s healthcare, whether it is social. There is so many social, right? There are so many hopeless situations that we’ve had to deal with as a society. So they put people into a hopeless situation and this is fascinating. This is why this is so relevant to today. The people were asked to solve an unsolvable social discrimination task. It’s basically like saying you have to solve racism right now and they gave them a hard task, and that created hopelessness because well, I can’t do it. They couldn’t solve it within a time period or something.

During this task, they were diffusing D-limonene and vanillin, which is the main component of vanilla. Basically, orange and vanilla, and they were asking the volunteers to rate the aroma’s quality. Whether it was intense, pleasant, or familiar before, after, and during their hopelessness exercise. Who would sign up for hopelessness exercise? Thank God for subjects and volunteer people. So, fascinatingly (this is the key), the more pleasant the participants judged the aroma—basically they felt it was good in the room, they liked it, it was nice to them—the less effective the hopelessness induction was in reducing happiness and increasing their mood.

So basically, what did we do? I don’t know about you but I dealt with a lot of hopelessness when I was a kid. And oh this study, I got to get in front of people, or oh whatever. We didn’t realize but intuitively and now we know because we’ve been educated on it, we send our kids off to school with this orange vanilla blend already putting them at an advantage so that if they will get into a hopeless situation at school, they’re going to feel better, and they’re going to be more empowered to get through it. And regardless of what happens around them, our teachers always say, well, your kids are always so happy, and that’s by design.

We understand, if all hell can be breaking loose around you, you could be in the midst of the worst situation possible, but if it is well with your soul. If you’re happy and joyful, some people might call you gullible or ignorant like Forrest Gump, I will tell you one thing, we could tease Forrest Gump through stupid is as stupid does, but that is a great example of how someone who is at peace, joy, happiness, and content in whatever situation that he’s in. It’s great to see how someone can overcome all odds. And so, ultimately, why do we do what we do is because we know it works and it has a desired effect.

[00:43:44] Ashley James: So psychologically, any essential oil, as long as you really enjoy the smell, would help you have more happiness and less hopelessness?

[00:43:53] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yes.

[00:43:55] Ashley James: So, in your book, The Essential Oils Apothecary, I’m sure you have a section on depression, mental health, possibly even postpartum. Beyond your orange and vanilla, what suggestions do really work effectively for these situations?

[00:44:16] Dr. Eric Zielinski: So here’s one thing, the problem—not problem, but let’s call out the elephant in the room—with that study was it was a D-limonene and vanillin study. Again, they extracted out the chemical. It was natural-based, and this is what chemists do because chemists are trying to hack into the chemicals so that they can create drugs. If they would have used orange and vanilla, I guarantee you, it would have had a more desired effect and would have been better.

So what does that tell us? Like for example, D-limonene which is a chemical that is rich in all citrus oils, top to bottom: orange, grapefruit, neroli, lime, bergamot, lemon, petitgrain. These oils should be in everyone’s toolkit if they want to boost their immune like proven. This is why, by the way, I like those studies because here’s the problem though, again, I guess let’s be honest, if they would have done an orange and vanilla study, well, what exactly in the orange helped? That’s where it’s like out of the 300 chemicals in orange or whatever it is, I know they’re all different. 150 to 200 chemicals in orange, which one was a deciding factor? Well, they guessed ahead of time, well, probably it’s D-limonene. And so that’s how they proved it.

That is the wonderful thing about it, and we find that limonene can help with substance abuse and addiction too. Limonene, in a recent study, uncovered that it greatly reduces drug addiction-related behaviors and dependence in lab rats. So they had cocaine-addicted lab rats or whatever it was—I forget, I’m sorry—heroin or something. But it was drug addiction and they incorporated limonene and it greatly reduced the addictive behaviors and the dependence. That’s why in my book, I have a chapter called depression and substance abuse.

Well, that seems weird. Why would you combine them two? Because they’re so intimately connected. And we find again the same chemicals in the oils that work in the same oils that work for one will work for the other. And so, that’s where hopelessness comes into play. I was an addict. I get it. I was an alcoholic. I was abusing street drugs. I was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, and hopelessness was the common denominator in my life for those several years. And it was a dark hole that I self-medicated with street drugs and alcohol just to get the high, just to get through the next day, just because I hated my life. And sad to say, how many people can relate to that right now?

At one point last year, Ashley, at one point during the pandemic, there were more people dying of suicide in Japan than there were people dying of COVID. Same thing with children in America. More kids were killing themselves than kids dying of the virus. There’s a reason for that, and I’ll tell you. Having faced the demon of suicide, suicide ideation, thinking about, meditating on, wondering, and contemplating how and where, I get that. And it’s hopelessness, that’s really the key.

And so if there’s something we could do to boost that to essentially hack into the system, you know what that would be realistically? Go out in nature. Go out in nature, go on a hike. Why? Because pinene, limonene, and other anti-inflammatory rich compounds are being emitted from the plants and trees. That’s why things like forest bathing, which I know you’ve had people on your show talk about before, have been shown to help people.

So the problem is, when someone’s already stressed out like they have been for the last year and a half, the whole world’s crumbling, everything. It’s just like, how much more can we handle as people and then you stick them inside their cardboard box all day. It’s like the perfect storm for absolute hopelessness. And no wonder we’re dealing with this huge, huge true pandemic of mental health conditions.

And what have I found myself doing? Craving to be outside. And when I can’t be outside because I’m grateful to be able to do what I do, but I’m stuck in my home. I can’t do this interview outside. People will get distracted. There’ll be horning, birds chirping, or whatever. I got to have a microphone. I’m in front of my computer. But guess what I have diffusing? Oils that are from trees. I love the cedarwoods, the sandalwoods, the Douglas firs, and the pine. If I can’t be out into a forest, I’m going to bring the forest inside.

[00:49:13] Ashley James: I love that. Bringing the medicinal properties of the forest inside if you can’t get out into it. And some people can’t. Some people aren’t mobile. Some people don’t live near forests. So you’re bringing what you know is a healing property. There’s other healing properties of being in a forest, but the fact that we don’t even realize that we’re inhaling medicinal properties being released by plants over outside, isn’t that amazing?

[00:49:47] Dr. Eric Zielinski: When you cut your grass and you smell—and I love that, I actually love the smell of fresh cut grass—what do you think that is? That’s the essential oil from the grass. And quite frankly I’m surprised. Well actually, we do have it. It’s called lemongrass, right? That’s a known essential oil. That’s been shown to help with everything from killing MRSA, to pain, to helping balance blood cholesterol levels, right. We talked about that in our cardiovascular disease chapter.

People aren’t distilling the grass that we see in our lawns and creating a diffuser blend out of it. I think that’s kind of coming next. I think we’re going to see more people getting back to those things that they love. Again, you’re right. To your point, there’s negative ions being emitted. There’s the beautiful sounds. You know what, research has proven that listening to sounds of nature have a more desired effect. Put you in the parasympathetic rest, digest, calm, meditative—that empowering state—versus sounds of industry, sounds of modernization, industrial society like cars, motors, engines, whatever it might be. Just the hum, hum, hum of your HVAC unit. Those non-nature sounds trigger a sympathetic fight or flight response.

So you’re out in nature, you’re hearing those natural sounds from the birds and the whistling of the trees or the rustling of the leaves, and you’re seeing—there’s actually a word because I’ve been studying a lot, especially for my book about forest bathing. There’s actually a word in Japan—that I couldn’t pronounce to save my life—that describes the type of sun that shines through the leaves. It’s like this golden beautiful heavenly ray.

We have no words in English to describe that, but it’s like a word to describe that particular light that shines through the trees. You’re getting that now. So you’re stimulating the ocular senses, the sight, and then now you’re stimulating the olfactory system because you’re breathing those chemical compounds that are being emitted from the plants. And then hopefully, you can maybe barefoot yourself or get to a point where you can earth, ground, and just be rooted again. And now you’re in a position where you can truly be one with nature and heal.

Here’s the cool thing about forest bathing too is it’s been proven to stimulate and boost considerably—we’re talking considerable production of natural killer cells and also anti-inflammatory compounds. You’re out forest bathing, it will soothe inflammation at the cellular level. It will cause your immune system to pump out natural killer cells that we have seen to be shown effective against fighting cancer. And just one two-hour forest bathing session will have a lasting effect of up to four weeks. So what does that mean?

Okay, I live in America. I’m a dad, I have five kids, I have an online business. Well, I try once a month or so to go out with my family and we just have a time like a day trip. Go up north, see some waterfalls, or go to the local park. And it doesn’t have to be a forest per se, it could be a dense tree, a wooded park, or anywhere you got some trees. We try to do that once a month or so, but you know what, it’s my way of life.

So right before this interview, I had a little bit of time and I went outside. I actually took my daughter, we have a park like 100 yards away from us in a little homeowner’s association subdivision. I took my daughter to the park and we ended up throwing rocks in the stream. And she ended up swinging for like five minutes. It was like a 15-minute daddy-daughter break for my four year old, but that’s my way of life. It’s like, let’s get some fresh air. Let’s get some sunlight. The thing is it’s not prescriptive. It’s not like, oh, let’s check the calendar. I don’t have to have an alert on my phone to say go outside and breathe. I crave it. It’s like my body yearns for it intuitively. It’s like get out of this cardboard box and be one. That’s life. I think that’s an abundant life. And that’s how we thrive during this season.

So yeah, if someone’s in a position where they can’t move very well or if they’re stuck, they’re sheltering in place, they’re quarantining, or whatever it is, open up the window at least. I mean, move yourself towards the windows so you get sunlight like the plants. I mean, just do whatever you have to do to interact with nature. Get those Douglas firs and citrus oils and defuse them in your diffuser. You have more control than you think over your environment to create a healthy atmosphere to thrive.

[00:54:25] Ashley James: I love it.

[00:54:28] Dr. Eric Zielinski: That’s a mic drop. I drop my mic and people would be like, bam, that’s a mic drop. Hey, we’re an hour into this where if people are listening, these are the diehards. We love you. Salute. I mean, seriously, I got my three fingers up there. This is Hunger Games, right. I love it. And these are the conversations we have to have, and this is how we have to challenge one another and encourage one another. I’m telling you, going back to hopelessness and helplessness, if you have a friend or a loved one who is in a position where they’re just not there, help them. I mean, this is where life happens now.

I’ve been doing this for 18 years. I’m very blessed, I’m fortunate to be able to make a living doing what I love doing. But this stuff, this talking, this writing, this researching, this helping people, look, I just found out. I’ll never forget going to work and I was working in finance. I was juicing green stuff. If it could be green, I’d juice it. The guys and gals at work would tease me. Hey, what’s in your juice today, Eric? Who do you think they went to when they got sick, no joke. He was like, hey, Eric, I got this. What do you think? I wasn’t a doctor then. I wasn’t anything then other than a guy who’s trying to be healthy and I was studying a lot. And you know what, that gave me so much purpose.

That’s the other thing, having a life outside your own, and that’s what forest bathing does too. It’s been shown to make you realize that you are truly just a speck in the microcosm. It gives you a sense of awe that there is something greater. Again, as a Christian, I have a creation perspective here. I don’t ever feel closer to God than when I’m in nature, but also it gives me a greater appreciation. It gives me a purpose. It makes me feel like I belong.

And so, here I was, using oils to help with maybe an athlete’s foot, an ache, or a pain, and then I realized there’s so much more to this. Why would I write another book? My first book is done well. It’s in 10 different languages around the world. It’s huge in my little space. Why write another one? Because I’m evolving, I’m shaping. I’m learning more. I realize more than ever the intricate connection we truly have with plants, and the hook is the essential oil. It’s not the fiber. It’s not the non-nutritive substance that just biodegrades. That’s all good, too, that has a purpose. But where the true healing happens, where the lives are truly changed is the essential oil.

It’s like, wow, it can help with addiction, it can help with depression, it can help with libido. It can actually help with sexual dysfunction. The number one most searched term on my website related essential oils—and we get millions of people visiting our website every year—is essential oils for sex. That blew my mind because I don’t have people asking me about it. Why? Obviously, it’s personal. People are searching through their fingers. So I’m like, you know what, I’m going to talk about this. So I did all the research on erectile dysfunction. Let’s cover this. Let’s go. Let’s do it.

[00:57:47] Ashley James: Now, how do you know it was men searching versus women? And what and what sexual dysfunctions were they searching for? Was it to enhance sex or was it because they couldn’t climax? Is it because the women of a certain age are drier down there and they want to maybe keep youth down there? Is it erectile dysfunction for men? I’m guessing you have a section in The Essential Oils Apothecary book that’s coming out on how you can use essential oils to have a healthy sex life.

[00:58:22] Dr. Eric Zielinski: We have a whole chapter on it, no joke. It’s erectile dysfunction and libido.

[00:58:26] Ashley James: Teach us.

[00:58:27] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Hey, can I give everyone a recipe?

[00:58:29] Ashley James: I’d love that.

[00:58:30] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Okay. I love sex. It’s okay to admit that.

[00:58:35] Ashley James: I mean, you’re married and you have five kids.

[00:58:39] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Let’s call it the elephant in the room here. And again, as Christians, I don’t know why certain things are taboo. Here’s the thing, I love food. I love playing with my kids. I love forest bathing. I love things that make me feel good. If sex was not desirable you wouldn’t do it. If you didn’t do it, the human race would have become extinct. Think about that. At the core, it’s the most primal evolutionary act that anyone, anything could do.

Here’s a blend. This is your blend. This is our blend. This is a blend that could change your life for a million reasons, if this is an area that you want to enhance.

[00:59:23] Ashley James: My mind is racing right now, I know I’m pausing for effect, but you’re going to tell us a blend of essential oils in my mind is like, where am I applying it topically? Am I eating it? Is it only on the man? Is it only on the woman? I’m already going at how does this get applied? Is it before sex? Is it every day? Is it during sex? I want you to just explain it so that we all get it how to do this correctly.

[00:59:49] Dr. Eric Zielinski: You know what, I took this book to another level meaning this, it dawned on me. Like you just said, people have those questions, all these little details. So what I’ve done for every health condition that the research could substantiate, and then I could prove from my own experience, I created a blend like a master blend. So there’s this master blend I call the sensual blend. And then I show people how to use it in their diffuser, their inhaler, a spray, a massage oil, roll on, or a bath. It’s like wow, you get one blend and you can use it for like 10 different things. Yeah. Same thing with cardiovascular disease. Same thing with Alzheimer’s.

So, this is the blend. You start off with a little baby 5 ml bottle. So you get an empty bottle and you can get them on Amazon. Start off with the top, 15 drops of orange essential oil, 10 drops of bergamot, 10 drops of neroli, 10 drops of lavender, 10 drops ylang-ylang, 5 drops of sandalwood, 5 drops of geranium, 5 drops of jasmine, 5 drops of patchouli, 6 drops of rose, and let’s round it off with 7 drops of vanilla.

Okay, the big question we always get is, I don’t have XYZ. Okay, don’t worry about it. I mean, this is the cool thing, don’t worry about it. I can’t afford rose. Well, some people can’t, I get it. And so what we found—here’s a cool little hack for people—is that you could get a pre-diluted bottle of rose oil and now most of the companies sell this kind of stuff. You get a pre-diluted bottle of rose in a roller bottle that’s now affordable.

[01:01:45] Ashley James: That can be your carrier, right? Carrier oil?

[01:01:47] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yeah, exactly. So now they dilute it so it’s a carrier oil, but yeah you’re only getting maybe 10 drops but it’s affordable. Because if you get a bottle of rose that can be $200. So, anyway, that’s the master blend, and this is one of those things where I’m telling you it might be worth it. It might be worth having a make and take party at your house and maybe your one girlfriend has jasmine, your other girlfriend has vanilla, your other girlfriend has rose. Have fun with it.

[01:02:09] Ashley James: Good idea. You all go in on it. So, ylang-ylang is something that can trigger migraines in some people. I’m one of those people where I really can’t. I’ll open a bottle, I’ll smell a blend of ylang-ylang, I’ll close the bottle, and I’ll be like, that was fun. I hope I don’t get a headache. Some people cannot handle ylang-ylang. I’m just starting to feel dizzy just thinking about it. I don’t know what it is about it. Will it be fine to not use it at all, or is there a ylang-ylang replacement in this blend?

[01:02:38] Dr. Eric Zielinski: The thing is that this is not like baking a cake where you need to replace an ingredient or it ends up becoming like a hockey puck.

[01:02:53] Ashley James: So it’s like making a salad. It’s like making a really delicious salad. Here’s all the ingredients, but if you don’t like croutons, you don’t have to have the croutons.

[01:03:00] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Exactly. And I’ll tell you though, for me, it will always maybe lack that essence of all of it. This is the synergy blend. And yes, if you don’t have any of them, if you don’t want any of them, or if you only got three of them, just start there. Now, this is your master blend and this is practically speaking. We give people step-by-step how to do all this stuff. You get this empty bottle and put a label on it. Call it your love blend, sensual blend, call it whatever blend you want to call it. Label it so you remember because if you’re like me you have like 30 blends in your medicine cabinet, you forget what’s what. So I’ve learned my lesson.

So now you got this master blend. So what you could do is how do you use it? Well, you can get an aromatherapy inhaler for a couple of bucks on Amazon. It looks like a lipstick tube. It’s basically a glass tube with organic cotton swab in the center of it essentially is what it is, and you could put like 20 to 25 drops of that sensual blend in that aromatherapy inhaler, and what do you do? Keep it handy, and when you want to “rev up your engines on your libido”, open the inhaler, take 10 deep breaths—and here’s what I suggest, seriously I suggest this. My wife and I are part of a Bible class for married couples. They explained how women are like crockpots and slow cookers where men are like microwaves. It’s just the nature of how we are.

And so, what you do is you get started, especially if you’re a woman or man who needs a little time to stew things going. Get this and take some deep breaths and think about love, think about romance, think happy thoughts about sex. It’s a shame you experience that with ylang-ylang, actually, because ylang-ylang is not a known aphrodisiac. What ylang-ylang does uniquely, specifically is it’s an anti-anxiety It’s anxiolytic property.

And so what it does, it’s been shown clinically to help reduce the stress and anxiety related to sex. That’s the key. Rose is a known aphrodisiac. Jasmine is a known aphrodisiac, but there’s also that stressful, like again, vaginal dryness, erectile dysfunction, abuse trauma, relationship concerns, whatever. There are a million reasons why someone would be hesitant or stressful about potentially having sex. Ylang-ylang has been shown to help reduce that.

So you have this inhaler that’s personal. See, you can do this without anyone knowing you’re doing it too because it’s personal. It’s not like a diffuser that is dispersing the essential oil in the room. But with that said, get the diffuser kicking. Imagine you’re trying to set the mood and maybe you put the diffuser on, and you just enjoy a nice meal together or you’re doing a foot rub on the couch watching a movie, whatever. But see, the diffuser can literally shape the environment of the room, and that’s where you would use it to potentially impact your partner.

This is where a lot of wives I noticed do this with husbands or women with men because men aren’t typically as open to certain things, and that’s a stigma that I’m willing to stand by because I’ve seen it. There’s research behind it. Women by and large are the drivers of a lot of this stuff.

[01:06:31] Ashley James: When you say this stuff you mean essential oils?

[01:06:33] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Of anything health-related, no joke.

[01:06:37] Ashley James: I was like, are we talking about sex? Are we talking about the bedroom stuff? Because I was like, men are usually the ones that are more like wanting to experiment, but you’re talking about health stuff. That makes sense.

[01:06:48] Dr. Eric Zielinski: And oils. Again, statistically speaking, men are not looking at oh let’s experiment with essential oils to get us into the mood.

[01:06:57] Ashley James: I think if you told the average husband, this is going to spice up the bedroom I think that they would be the ones going, why haven’t you put it in the diffuser yet?

[01:07:09] Dr. Eric Zielinski: That’s what I’m talking about. Guys, if you’re listening, that’s the thing. If you want to do something, say hey, I just listened to this crazy lady podcast with this crazy guy and they said something to do. Can you mind if I put something or whatever. You could be real subtle. This could be something where you don’t even let her know. But yeah, I’m speaking to guys and gals. But again, it’s fun.

[01:07:34] Ashley James: So you put this in the diffuser, you could also put it in a bath.

[01:07:38] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Massage oil.

[01:07:39] Ashley James: You could put it in a massage oil. We’re not applying it directly on the vulva, in the penis though?

[01:07:46] Dr. Eric Zielinski: This one particularly is something that I am not concerned too much about. You want to be careful. You want to be careful, which one specifically? This is one of those things where I have no problem with it and so my wife doesn’t either. You need to dilute it to like less than 1% though, which means six drops of this blend per one ounce of a carrier. So basically, you get a few tablespoons of coconut oil, three or four drops of this. We actually do have a lubricant recipe, and it is similar essential oils. I mean, when you have the essential oils lavender, Roman chamomile, ylang-ylang, rose—all these are safe. So yes, you can. You really can. But the key is though, highly diluted. You can’t mess around with this neat.

[01:08:46] Ashley James: Okay. I’m going to ask another question because in the bedroom stuff ends up in people’s mouths. Is it okay if you accidentally ingest some of this blend?

[01:08:55] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yeah.

[01:08:57] Ashley James: Okay. So safety. The safety around it.

[01:09:01] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yes, exactly. And all these, I mean super highly concentrated. Out of this list, people typically don’t ingest Jasmine. But again, you’re getting like 1/10 of maybe 1/2 of 1% of 1 drop.

[01:09:19] Ashley James: Yeah, you’re not supposed to drink this.

[01:09:21] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yeah, but the blend though, in and of itself, I said five drops of jasmine in just the blend as a whole. And then once you put only two drops of the blend, you know what I mean? Once you get down, this is parts per million. By the way, good point. Wintergreen you don’t drink, but what do you think flavors your root beer, right? So that’s my argument always with the aromatherapist, it always goes down to dosage. Yes, you don’t put five drops of wintergreen and take it as a capsule pill because that could cause liver and kidney toxicity. But parts per billion, yes, that’s what flavors our soft drinks.

So yes, good question. All this is safe. At the end of the day, you got to experiment and you got to enjoy. But yes, all this is completely if you use it the right way and follow the instructions—when’s the last time you were struggling with sleep? You went to the pharmacy, you got a sleep aid, and you just randomly took how many pills you wanted to without reading the instructions first. Unless you use the product, typically, you would look first. Okay. How many pills should I take? That’s what I want to encourage people. You look at the instructions.

[01:10:38] Ashley James: Yeah, and then there’s men out there, and I know one that drank two bottles of cough syrup because it made him feel better and ended up in the hospital with acetaminophen poisoning. Because there’s cartoons on it and it tastes good. They make it all child flavor and it makes you feel good, so you think you can just sip on it. You can just sip on it all weekend long while you have a head cold. And meanwhile, on the back, it’s like one tablespoon every eight hours. Do not exceed four tablespoons in a 48-hour period or whatever.

What’s scary is that Costco sells lethal-sized amounts. When you buy cough syrup, for example, if you were to drink that on a weekend, that will kill you. You can buy Tylenol or aspirin in a bottle so big that that bottle will kill you. That is too much, right? People that don’t read the instructions, right? But it’s weird that we sell over the counter dosages of something that are lethal expecting people to read the tiny words on the back.

But yes, to your point, we need to follow the instructions. Just like you would take seriously instructions on pharmaceuticals, either over the counter, at least I hope you would. How is it that I have so many friends that I know of that have misused over the counter meds because society just treats drugs like candy? And they end up with these health problems, right? And even some people take them within the normal parameters but they didn’t realize that they had MTHFR.

I’ve just recently learned this. You can’t take CBD with certain pain meds because the pathways in the liver are the same and it will cause a backup in the body. So you’ve got over the counter pain meds, over the counter CBD, and neither bottle says don’t take with the other, and you take them both. If you happen to have MTHFR as well or if you have any other health conditions, where your liver’s already weak to begin with, you can go into some kind of shock. So, these are all over the counter things that we just think that pharmaceuticals are safe like candy. I mean, honestly, right?

[01:13:16] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Can I brag on my book for a second?

[01:13:17] Ashley James: I do. I want you to because I want people to know that we can use these safely, but we have to follow the instructions and the instructions are in your books.

[01:13:25] Dr. Eric Zielinski: I got a chart, and I didn’t do it in the first book and I realized that was one of the reasons I needed a follow up. I hired somebody, and this is where I’m good at what I do but there’s limits and I recognize that. I hired a trained aromatic practitioner or aromatherapist who’s a researcher. I paid her a good amount of money because she earned every bit of it, and she spent a ton of time compiling the most exhaustive, up-to-date drug interaction list with essential oils possible. That’s in the book. That right there is worth the book is just to know.

And by the way, teaser, there’s not a lot of concern. There’s a handful or two handfuls of essential oils that if you consume, then you need to be careful. But by and large, topical application and inhalation like through aromatherapy inhalers and diffusers, you don’t have to worry. But there are certain oils that are better not just if you’re on a drug, and one of them—I’ll let the cat out of the bag—is so important that everyone needs to know because so many people are on blood thinners right now. Do not be consuming clove. That’s a problem because the big network marketing companies have their “immunity blend”, and all of them include clove because clove oil contains some of the highest quantity of antioxidants of any substance that’s available.

The ORAC score, the measure of antioxidants, of clove has been reported up to a million. Compare that with wild organic blueberries, which is great, but that only has like a 7000 ORAC score. We’re talking a million. So clove, that’s a big thing. So, if you’re on warfarin or any kind of blood thinner, be very careful about consuming anything with clove. And not that I’m saying it’s a guaranteed reaction, but you overdo it, you could hurt yourself. That’s what we give people. And again, people look at this stuff and everything that we’re trying to do to help people is to take away that pain point of fear because there’s paralysis by analysis.

I’ll never forget when I was marketing, when I was in the corporate world, there’s ignorance on fire or paralysis by analysis, and there’s a balance between the two. I want people to be educated, but the word is empowered. I want to empower people where they feel, yeah, I’m confident. I know what to do. And you know what, when you, your children, or a loved one has something happen, and I guarantee you, someone’s going to get sick, someone’s going to get a booboo, someone’s going to cut themselves, that’s life, you’ll know what to do. And that right there puts you in the driver’s seat.

Like you mentioned before, you’re not running to the doctor for every little thing. I am self-sustaining. That is worth gold. That’s priceless.

[01:16:43] Ashley James: Absolutely. Just thinking of how I use essential oils in my medicine cabinet, tea tree oil, I don’t understand people that don’t have tea tree oil in their medicine cabinet because it’s such a staple. It has always been a staple since I started using essential oils back when I was a teenager.

I’ve had maybe three in my lifetime nail bed infections. I mean, they’re freaking painful. Probably right up there with birth giving. So painful. Oh man. There’s a throbbing pain. One of them was on my big toe and that was because I was running around the jungle with no shoes on in Florida and I don’t know what I caught. But tea tree oil, just dosing my toe everyday with tea tree oil. I had a finger one and then I had another toe one for some reason. It hasn’t happened in a long time but tea tree oil, for me, has always been something. But you got to be careful. Dilute it correctly, that kind of stuff. I don’t ingest it.

Once in a while I’ll get ear infections. I figured out why, and I’m dairy-free and really, really don’t eat sugar very often. Very, very low sugar. All the things that you would think when you think of ear infections, but I’m allergic to latex and I wear these studio headphones all day long. And then I was sleeping on a latex pillow. And so I was getting zero infections. My ear was very upset, particularly I sleep on my left side more than my right. It’s just unconscious when I’m sleeping, it’s what happens.

And so I was developing these ear infections and I couldn’t figure out why. And so I got garlic mullein oil and put drops of tea tree oil in it. So I supercharged my garlic mullein oil that also has calendula in it. Oh my gosh, that stuff is amazing because I’ve used antibiotic drops. I will not let a doctor give me antibiotics orally for an ear infection when you can just do a local. I found that putting a few drops of tea tree oil in the garlic mullein oil with calendula was more effective than when in the past I have used antibiotic drops.

And so, I probably had about three or four ear infections in the last five years. It’s not been a lot, but each time I feel it coming on, I go immediately to the garlic mullein oil with the tea tree. I add a few extra drops just to freshen it up. Not that much. It’s like a four ounce bottle and I add two drops because I don’t want to overdo it. And then our son only once, and he’s of course dairy-free as well. And I keep saying that, for those who don’t know, the number one cause of ear, nose, and throat infections in children is cow dairy consumption.

This again should be criminal, I’m getting up on my soapbox, but MD pediatricians, it should be criminal that they go to a surgery in which by the way they have to put a child under anesthesia, and that has killed children before. I have read the articles of the children that have died because of anesthesia to have their adenoids removed, their tonsils removed, and put tubes in their ears all that could have been prevented from a dietary change. I mean, that should be malpractice, right? But the MD, the kindhearted MD pediatrician has not been taught this. This is not their education. This is up to us as the patients to educate ourselves.

So if you go to an ND, a Naturopathic pediatrician, they are way more likely to start you off with dietary changes, herbs, essential oils, and much more gentler, less invasive procedures than something that is a potentially life-threatening surgery for a child. And that doesn’t solve the problem either. The immune system is still having major issues. They’ll just express deeper in the body. So, when you’re using these drops in your ears, you have to make sure that your eardrum hasn’t ruptured yet. You don’t want to put stuff in your ears if your eardrum is ruptured. But I use it with our son—I don’t know why he got an ear infection. It came and went, but the drops with garlic mullein oil with calendula and tea tree oil made it come and go so fast and never had a problem since.

And so that’s my one thing. If I could say everyone has one essential oil, of course, it doesn’t smell great. It’s probably not going to be like your aphrodisiac scent.

[01:21:46] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yeah, it’s not in the love chapter.

[01:21:48] Ashley James: I love it because when I smell it, I feel like I’m getting out—what’s that cleaner that they use in hospitals? My friend had a love affair with the scent of this, I don’t know why. But in Canada, they use this one cleaner in every single hospital. And when you smell it, you’re like, oh, this place is disinfected. It smells like it would strip cancer off the walls. It is such a powerful scent that you just know you’re walking into a clean hospital. There’s no MRSA here. They’ve already doused the place with something that literally made every microbe die within a 100 mile radius.

But when I smell tea tree oil, I’m like, yeah, we’re going to kill those germs. That’s what it smells like to me. But it doesn’t smell in any way like it’s going to uplift my mood. I think it’s good to have those two, clary sage and rose bergamot for me are my go-to make me happy scents. I smell them and I’m immediately in a good mood. I don’t know what it is. But clary sage is really good for female hormones, I know that. So those two are my feel good, happy. I like blending them together, that’s my thing. Just like you do the orange and the vanilla.

So I think it’s good that we experiment and figure out what makes us happy, what smells are really good to us. And then go deeper and learn. Wouldn’t it be cool, you smell a bunch of them at the store, figure out which one you really love, and then study that one and go wow, it helps with eyesight or it helps with liver function. Get The Essential Oil Apothecary book and start smelling ones you’d ever smell before and then go, wow, this one really resonates with me. I’m going to learn more about it because it resonates with you.

We could look at it from the standpoint of, I have liver disease, I want to heal my liver disease. Let’s go through the apothecary book and learn how to do that. Or we could go and just smell a bunch of essential oils, find ones that make us really happy, and then start studying those just to start, right? We can do either way with your book.

[01:23:56] Dr. Eric Zielinski: You know, you mentioned something that quite frankly warrants an entire conversation. I’m sure we’re wrapping up here in a minute so I don’t know how long we have to talk about this. But your experience with tea tree is very similar to my experience with lavender. Tea tree imprinted you. You have a neurological response. It’s like gravity. It’s like your reflex response. It’s almost automatic. That could have the opposite effect. That’s why I talk about abuse and trauma as well is that the olfactory system directly impacts and will create the neurological impulse to your limbic system, your memory, your mood, your emotions.

And so, what’s really fascinating about this is it’s worth the effort and life-long benefits of finding something that really works for you. I guess as a warning, as a rule of thumb—I’ll just throw this out there for you, Ashley—maybe there is a biochemical something or another that we don’t really understand surely, but maybe biologically, your chemistry just interacts with ylang-ylang in such a way where it just, eh, I don’t know. Maybe your body rejects it or maybe something happened subconsciously, when there was a ylang-ylang scent or aroma in the air around you.

I found that whether it’s trauma, whether it’s abuse, whether it is a negative stressful experience, some people, when they smell an essential oil, they automatically like whoa, they find themselves agitated. That’s not necessarily the fact that the oil could be synthetic, it could be adulterated, but we find that a lot of these people something happened.

That’s why folks like my friend Dr. Tony Jimenez, who runs the Hope4Cancer clinics around the world, has all of his patients go through emotional recall therapy because according to him, cancer is really, at its root, an emotional disorder. And so, all of his patients go through emotional recall therapy. And Dr. Leslie and the other doctors that do this, they’re using aromatherapy as an anchor. So whatever aroma it is that makes you feel good at that moment is the anchor during the sessions so that when something happens, and invariably it does, in the future you smell that aroma, it brings you back to the point of healing that you were going through during your sessions.

And for me, I had such a wonderful spiritual epiphany in a season of my life and I was introduced to lavender. In fact, I was introduced to essential oils through a lavender hand soap. And believe it or not, it was lavender that every single time I smell lavender, it reminds me of 18 years ago when I became a Christian. It reminds me of that dramatic I was blind, now I see moment when I was being mentored and loved, and unconditionally accepted by people. That wasn’t my life experience before that.

Today, lavender is an anchor for me and will be, God willing, for the rest of my life. And so, for you, for whatever reason, tea tree. And there may be something, who knows, with ylang-ylang. Maybe at the deep subconscious level just something. It could have been anything like hearing bad news. And that’s the thing about today in 2021, who has not been traumatized? At some microscopic level of even literally being forced to stay in your home outside of your will without leaving, or whatever it might be, who has not had some sort of micro or macro traumatic experience in the last year? You’d be hard pressed to find anybody, myself included.

So, with that said, what triggers that experience in you? A food, smell, hearing sensation, or music. Now is the time more than ever to be truly cognizant and in tune with who we are. I’m not here to be a false prophet or the bearer of bad news, but I’m telling you something, mark my words on this, we’re going to see such a ramping case of PTSD across the globe. And people don’t even realize they’re living through it now.

It’s like they don’t realize that they need to process the micro trauma and the macro trauma, whether it is just whatever. Someone dies, whether it’s you lose a job, whether it’s you lose some freedoms or health freedoms, or whatever it might be. This has been such a traumatic experience in a season that has lasted now nearing a year and a half plus two years depending on when you’re listening to this. And the long-lasting effects are going to be forever unless we truly come to terms and grip and bring healing.

So why am I mentioning this? Well, aromatherapy can help you through this whole process. And just truly trust me, do yourself a favor, be in tune with yourself. Listen. Even if it’s at an intuitive level, if you feel drawn away from something, listen to that warning. If you feel drawn to something, follow it with reckless abandon. Do what you need to do to feel good and have yourself be in a place where you allow yourself to be well.

[01:29:48] Ashley James: I love it. Well, I hope listeners want to follow this with reckless abandon. Well, I mean, with caution also on our side. To do it responsibly and using moderation. Because we can replace chemicals, artificial things with essential oils, and you’re showing us how.

I interviewed Dr. Klinghardt who has been an MD, a medical doctor, for over 40 years. It’s a very interesting interview because people come from around the world to see him. One of his clinics is in my backyard, but he is famously known around the world as being a doctor you go to when you don’t know what the heck is wrong. When you’ve been to the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic or every clinic and they all say we don’t know what’s wrong with you, then people find Dr. Klinghardt. So he regularly reverses really, really bad Lyme disease, really weird parasitic infections, and also has an amazing track record for getting children to no longer be on the spectrum.

Now, in our interview we talk about this, are they truly autistic or did they just have autistic-like symptoms? Because when you and I were kids, it was very rare to ever meet a child with true autism. It was very, very rare. And now, almost every classroom—because statistically it’s like 1 in 30 or something—can technically have a child with autism in it. So is it real autism when it goes from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 30 in less than one generation? Something is amiss.

So I think it’s autism-like symptoms. I don’t think it’s true autism. I think a lot of children are being misdiagnosed because it’s all the same symptoms, and that’s because of several things, but one is the inability to detox heavy metals, which end up in the brain tissue. One of the causes of that is Glyphosate. Glyphosate will bind to heavy metals and release them into kidney tissue and into brain tissue because glyphosate is a chelator that will release heavy metals when pH changes, and blood changes pH when it changes to another liquid. For example, blood to urine, blood to cerebral spinal fluid. And this is something we covered. I have two interviews with Dr. Stephanie Seneff, who’s a Ph.D. MIT top research scientist, and she goes through this.

That’s why I had Dr. Klinghardt on the show to talk about heavy metal detox. And through that he spoke about his experience being trained as an MD in Germany. In his medical school, while he was being taught surgery, he was being taught acupuncture and homeopathy. As well as all the other things that MDs are taught like pharmaceutical drugs. There’s one part of Germany that’s very holistic. He walks out of medical school, comes to America over 45 years thinking every doctor knows how to use homeopathy and boy was he surprised.

Remember, his training is MD. He still knows every drug known to man and when to use them. He says, my favorite thing is to not use drugs. My favorite thing is to find something in nature that works better than drugs and use that instead. And if he has to use a drug like a chelator, let’s just say it’s more beneficial. He weighs the risks and it’s more beneficial to use a drug-based chelator for that one patient, then that’s what he’ll do. But his thing is to look at what we can do with essential oils, herbs, and homeopathy. Look what we can do with plants first.

So his whole mantra for over 40 years of practicing medicine has been, I will find a plant that does the job better. And if I don’t, then I’ll go to the drug. But most of the time he ends up using a plant. And could you imagine if you go to your cardiologist and they go well, I see that your LDL lipids are high. I’m seeing your cholesterol levels aren’t really trending in the right direction. Your A1C is getting up there. I’m not happy with your high blood pressure. We could put you on blood pressure meds, Metformin. We could put you on a cholesterol lowering medication. Of course, all of this will lead to a lower life expectancy and more complications in the future.

But instead, I’d really like to get you on some lavender oil. I want to cut out the peanut oil in your diet, the omega 6s, and I really would like to get you eating more plants and antioxidants. Let’s get you on some of those essential oils that have antioxidants in them. Let’s get you walking every day out in nature, and then come back in three months and let’s retest you. Could you imagine?

I just did an interview with a doctor that talked about how they did several studies and they found that dark chocolate was something like 66 times more effective than cholesterol lowering medication when it came to the outcomes of preventing heart disease? And yet, they’re not prescribing that but are prescribing something that causes side effects and harms us. So, I’m a big advocate for your book. I’m really excited that it’s coming out. I think it’s going to be a game-changer for a lot of people because they can look to these less invasive things first to make the changes.

[01:35:50] Dr. Eric Zielinski: And that’s the lifestyle because you know what, what you’re proposing and what you’re sharing is reality for a growing number of people. Out of all the things that have happened to us lately, one of the greatest things is this mass awareness and discussion that we’re having. Okay, well, let’s revisit immune health, let’s revisit what we’re doing. People are questioning, people are looking, and they’re starting to investigate. A lot of medical doctors are starting to see, and it’s wonderful. It really is. Things come full circle, Ashley, and that’s really the cycle of life. We’re not too far away. This drug phenomenon that we’ve been in has taken the world by storm all because of greed and political influence, yet we’re not even 100 years away.

In the scheme of things, what’s 100 years in the timeline of humanity? I mean, we’re not even 100 years into this new revolution. And when you look at chronic disease, which is the purpose and the sole motive behind why I did what I did with The Essential Oils Apothecary, when you look at the number of diseases that are rising up as the primary causes of death, that’s an issue. I mean, people were dying. I get this a lot and this is one of the arguments that people say, well, their life expectancy. Well, yeah, because we don’t have the bubonic plague and dark plagues, and we’re not like drinking, urinating, and bathing in the same water. That’s why.

I mean, yes, basic sanitation really was the solution to most diseases before the chronic disease epidemic started 100 years ago or so. That’s really eye-opening when you look at it. I have a biblical worldview and Moses died at 120, I believe it. I believe that when I read the Bhagavad Gita or when you look at your ancient scriptures, you’re seeing people live to a ripe old age and they’re healthy and strong. That to me is the promise that we have available to us, and this body is wonderfully adapt and adapting to adapt, essentially, to regenerate and to heal. And if using essential oils as part of your holistic lifestyle can help, hallelujah, go for it. So that’s it. I love it.

[01:38:24] Ashley James: And there are so many religions, ancient cultures that have documented the use of essential oils. The Thieves blend is something that certain essential oil brands will sell, but the Thieves blend is rumored to be the blend that was used during the bubonic plague. Grave robbers would wear all these herbs. If they could get essential oils out of them, they would have, but they wore all these herbs and these herbs helped them to stay healthy while they were thieves basically being exposed to the plague.

I love the Thieves blend, and every company does their own version of it. But it’s like that highly disinfectant, really great for these times when people are a little bit more on edge when it comes to having a cold or flu. Because even if you’re not worried about getting COVID and maybe you’ve already had it or you’re not letting fear into life. The problem is if anyone these days develops a basic cold, a little sniffle, everyone around you is paranoid.

My friend had to pull her kid out of school this week because he had a runny nose. No other symptoms, a runny nose, and he has to now go get a COVID test, quarantine, and wait for the COVID test before he’s allowed back to school. And I get it. This is the stressor that we’re all living under, which is why we should forest bathe in essential oils, bring nature into us to help de-stress. But if you had just a basic little cold, little sniffle, little sinus thing, everyone around you looks at you like, oh my gosh, are you going to kill me?

I’m leaning towards using more and more the Thieves blend. Maybe you could tell us what your version of the thieves blend is. Is there a clove and there’s thyme in it? What other herbs?

[01:40:37] Dr. Eric Zielinski: The immune-boosting blend of a variety of it, one version of it was shown clinically in research trials to kill the flu virus in vitro. So here’s the list. I mean, our version of it, actually, I’m glad you mentioned it because I’ll give you guys and gals, listening, let me pull it up. I want to make sure. I make it all the time for me and my kids, but let me quote, pull it up in my book because it’s really kind of cool. We share immune-boosting strategies in the book obviously because if your immune system is dampened, you’re not going to be able to really beat chronic disease.

So our immune-boosting blend that we recommend is going back to your 5 ml bottle that we shared earlier with the love blend, get 10 drops of cinnamon bark essential oil, 10 drops of clove bud, 10 drops of eucalyptus. And personally, I have not found a difference between eucalyptus globulus or eucalyptus radiata. I mean, it’s one of those things, whatever frankincense you got, whatever orange wood you got, whatever eucalyptus, they have such similar properties and chemical structures that there’s no major difference in this case. Ten drops of lemon, 10 drops of orange, and 10 drops of rosemary. That’s our immune-boosting blood completely safe to consume, safe properly, of course, safe to apply topically. Again, remember, clove and Warfarin, remember your blood thinners and your drug interactions. But what we do is here’s a little recipe. My kids call it healthy butter.

I love this immune-boosting snack as part of our prophylactic immune-boosting strategy when it was in flu season. But now it’s like, okay, well let’s take this, especially when COVID hit, this was something we took on a regular basis, just because we weren’t sure what was happening with that thing. Now we’ve kind of settled down where we’re not taking it every day, but here’s our recipe.

Start with a tablespoon of unsweetened nut butter. We love creamy almond butter or if you can get NuttZo butter. I love NuttZo. We get that at Costco. It’s a mixture of a bunch of different nuts. Or you can get sunflower butter or nut butter. Get one serving of a non-flavored liposomal vitamin C. It’s a form of vitamin C that is highly absorbable. I’m sure you’ve had people in the past talk about it on your show. One teaspoon of raw honey. I like manuka honey, extremely beneficial for health and immune-boosting. One teaspoon of organic virgin coconut oil, two drops of this immune-boosting blend I mentioned before, and I like a quarter-ish teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice.

For those people in Australia who ask me what is that because you don’t know what that is because that’s American, I’ve had this question a lot. It’s basically a mixture of the spices you would put in pumpkin pie. That would be cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, allspice, and a tiny pink Himalayan pink salt. You mix that together, yum. Spoon it up, eat it solo, or add some freshly cut veggie sticks or apple slices. That’s what my kids call healthy butter.

I kid you not, that version of that to the nth degree because I like 10X that. That was how my wife and I managed pneumonia when we had black mold in our home. I stretched this to the point because we took antibiotics. I’ll confess, the first time I’d taken, the only time I’ve taken antibiotics in the last 20 years, and I took it because I was about to launch a health summit, and I was on the other side of the microphone. I was interviewing 15 people. I had pneumonia, and I had 15. I don’t know what would you do. I had a choice.

[01:44:33] Ashley James: Well you get to a point. We believe that emergency allopathic medicine is there for us when we need it and we try to avoid it, not putting our head in the sand like the creator of the Muppets. I mean, God rest his soul. I love Jim Henson.

He was so afraid of doctors that he didn’t do anything to take care of himself and he died of the common cold basically. It just developed into pneumonia and he died. He lived in New York City and had access to the world’s top traditional Chinese medicine, as an example. He could have gone and done herbal medicine, anything. Reading the end of his life, reading the description of what happened, he was so afraid of doctors he chose to do nothing. We’re not saying don’t take antibiotics and don’t do anything, we’re saying, if you have a cold, try everything else first and if it gets to the point where it’s pneumonia, you know what, antibiotics might be what you need. I’m not going to fault you there.

[01:45:47] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Let me tell you my story though because here’s the thing. This is my confession. I’m real. I’m a person, right. So I tried everything I could to knock this thing out naturally. I had a huge deadline. My livelihood was depending on this project. I went to the doctor. I got an antibiotic, which helped reduce the coughing and things for the two, three weeks that I needed to during this interview. But you know what happened? As you would think, it came back again. I got sicker than I was before. No joke. So for me, it backfired, but it got me through this little hump, and I didn’t have a solution. By the way, here’s the thing about drugs.

Drugs are designed to have an immediate impact quickly where natural solutions virtually every time, it will take a little longer. It’s just the nature of it. It takes the body time to respond. That’s why our antifungal yeast infection tampon recipe, well, it’s been shown clinically to knock it out within three days. But you take an antifungal drug and that’s a lot quicker. Most women, who wants to wait three days? So I get that.

I was beside myself because yeah, I went through the 20 interviews I had to do. I did my summit, I did all this stuff, but I was sicker than I was. That’s when a friend of mine introduced me to liposomal vitamin C and I was like wow. This was a long time ago and this is when I was introduced to this immune-boosting blend manuka honey combination. I took like 10 doses of this a day. And between that and getting a proper air purifier to help with the black mold that we found, that healed my wife and I of pneumonia.

And so for us. I have recognized the impact of medicine and natural medicine when used appropriately. But yeah, that recipe I shared with you is the modern tasty version of what we put together years and years ago when quite frankly, medicine failed us because that’s what happens to people. You go from prescription to prescription to prescription and then you never get well. That’s where I recognize that unless I’ve exhausted my resources, I’m not going to try it.

So to your point, don’t judge yourself, don’t let yourself get beat up. If you’re at a point where whatever it is, you got to do what you got to do. You got to be you. And even if that’s taking chemotherapy or radiation, you have to be true to who you are and you got to live to the light that you have. And me too. We all are destined, I believe, to walk different paths. But trust me on this, regardless—and this is so important, this is the importance of integrative medicine—of what you choose, if you choose don’t think of it as an all allopathic, all-natural. You should always incorporate natural solutions regardless.

So it doesn’t mean like, oh I’m going to take chemo, I can’t use essential oils. No, that is a lie that medicine uneducated practitioners promote that we’re trying to correct. But the ones that get it, the ones that are truly integrative, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve known. Of the millions of people that follow us, this is a common thing that we get through emails, chat, and text messages that we get through our support team. Their oncologist tells them not to use essential oils and supplements while they’re on chemo. Says who? There’s absolutely zero research. This is the stuff I cover in the book on my cancer chapter, says who?

If you talk to an educated oncologist, truly educated who knows the literature, they’ll say, well, there’s virtually no risk. Let’s watch it together. Let’s do this together. Not this no-yes hard line in the sand. That’s malpractice in my opinion. By the way, we filmed the documentary. I don’t know if you watched this actually. I’ll send you a DVD of it. If you want a free screening of a documentary that we produced about a woman’s story, an integrative cancer story, go to hopeforbreastcancer.com. We were so inspired by this that my wife and I donated $50,000 to the Independent Cancer Research Foundation to send a woman to the Hope4Cancer Clinic in Cancun to get integrative treatments, and we documented her journey, and she goes through it.

She did things in secret afraid of what her oncologist would say because her US-based oncologist was not supportive of XYZ. And that’s the environment. That’s the wrong doctor to have. It’s not judgmental against anyone. It’s like look, find someone who respects you and will support you for what you want to do. And if there is a firm contraindication based on the science, then yes. But by and large, telling someone on chemotherapy that they shouldn’t take vitamin C because it can counteract the immune, it’s nonsense. That’s nonsense.

What we’re doing is we’re challenging all of us, myself included, to really think and work together because we do not want a line in the sand where we’re not willing to cross over. We want unity. We don’t want division here. So, yes, you can and should never ever cast aside your natural solutions. You should always have that be part of your way of life. And when needed, yeah, thank God medicine is there. I mean really, thank God, for a lot of people whose lives have been saved by medicine. But don’t think it’s an all or nothing thing.

And so for us, yeah of course, I mean granola as you get. We’re the home birth. We don’t do all these other things, but we know what to do when it’s time. And when it’s time to go to the hospital because we did our stuff. It’s knowing that you have most things. And in my first book I quoted an urgent care doctor. Essentially my paraphrase said, 75% to 80% of the people that come to urgent care have no business being there. Simple things that they should be able to manage themselves. This is from an urgent care doc. It’s about let’s flip that on its head. It’s a wonderful, wonderful journey of you use supplements, proper nutrition, mind-body practices, and using plant-based medicine like essential oils. Wow, what a wonderful chat. I love it. I love it.

[01:52:41] Ashley James: The trick is to know when to use what. And on the flip side, there are people this year. I’m friends of friends of some of them who have died this year because they didn’t seek medical help because they didn’t want to go to the emergency room and they weren’t sure if they should. On the flip side, we need to be better at listening to our body day-to-day, to be incorporating preventive medicine day-to-day, and don’t be ashamed or scared to seek help, seek advice. Hey, is this normal? Hey, should I get this checked out.

If you have health insurance, I’m pretty sure all health insurance does this nowadays, telemedicine with a nurse, telemedicine with a doctor. Within minutes you could be on the phone with someone saying, hey, these are my symptoms. What do you think? Should I just book an appointment? Should I do a telemedicine appointment with my doctor in a few days? Is this urgent?

Having stuff at home like a thermometer, a pulse oximeter, and a blood pressure cuff allows you to just check your vitals yourself. Make sure that they’re calibrated, that they work. And just don’t put your head in the sand. But there’s no harm in incorporating something that will boost you, that will support you like incorporating essential oils when done healthfully, rather than wait till you’re so sick that you need a larger intervention like you need the hammer. I’d rather handle it when it’s a whisper in the body than wait until my body is screaming and being hit by a 2×4.

When we see people recover from, let’s say infection, health isn’t never being sick. Health is how quickly we recover, and that also goes from mental and emotional health too. When I lost my mom to cancer we were best friends. And to lose her so suddenly, she was diagnosed in Easter and died in July. She was the epitome of health to me. She actually ignored little signs in her body because she just thought, oh, whatever. She had moved from Canada to Florida. She was doing new routines. She ignored that there were little aches and pains or little warning signs for about a year. She ignored them and just plowed through because she had a strong constitution.

We don’t want to ignore. We don’t want to overreact, but you don’t want to ignore either. And by the time she found the cancer, because she was already such a strong and healthy person, it was riddled everywhere in her body. And someone who eats a standard American diet would have been bedridden, but she was up and running because she was healthy in other ways.

But she died very quickly and I was left with wanting to heal emotionally as healthfully as possible. And so, I did a lot of personal growth work and I found one man who mentored me. He was one of the original Landmark Forum leaders. And he had suddenly lost his brother halfway through leading a course in front of 200 people. He taught me some really interesting things about being with grief and not resisting but being with it.

And he said, being healthy and emotionally healthy too is not about never being sad or never being depressed. It’s how quickly you’re going to bounce back. It’s that muscle that you build, how quickly can you get out of victim mode, get out of reaction mode? How quickly can you come back into peace, come back into learning, come back into understanding? How quickly can you recover from that, learn from it, grow from it, heal, and be with the emotions too. Don’t resist them, don’t push them down.

And same goes for physical ailments. We’re all going to be exposed to microbes. This is a dirty world we live in, and that’s good. We have more cells that are not us than our us in us and on us. We have more bacteria than cells. We are all part of this microcosm of good and bad bacteria for us and viruses and all that stuff. It’s the environment to the body that determines how quickly we can recover from that.

My friend just less than two weeks ago broke her leg skiing. She is already walking, not a walking cast. It’s like a cast she can take on and off. She’s already walking on it. The doctor said six months to repair. She’s like, are you kidding me? She’s doing salves on it. She’s doing everything known to man. All the essential oils and all the homeopathy and eating. Eating everything that’s super, super bone-building healthy for her. Her doctor is also cool. He said, listen to your body because she’s like, can I walk on it, can I put weight on it? He goes, listen to your body. And she’s able to put weight on it and walk a little bit on it and with no pain. She’s listening to her body.

But could you imagine if your version of your mindset of health is, I’m going to practice preventive medicine every day so that when I do get sick I recover quicker. So when I do injure myself, I heal faster than I would if I just ate McDonald’s and waited until I need to be put on antibiotics. That’s the philosophy, right? We’ve talked about the mindset of healing, and that’s why I think we want to have The Essential Oils Apothecary as one of the books in our library so that we can go to essential oils and use them on a regular basis as the herbal medicine that supports us in building our bodies up—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually building ourselves up.

Thank you so much Dr. Eric Z for being on the show. This has been a lot of fun. Continue coming back, continue teaching, bringing us more recipes, and I’m really looking forward to having my hands on your book. I know it’s coming out soon and listeners can preorder it, but it’s going to be out soon. I’m already thinking of Christmas, it’s going to be great as a Christmas gift.

[01:59:30] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yes. I hope. Yes, it’s perfect timing. Thank you. It’s always wonderful. You bring so much insight, and quite frankly, you’re an expert in your own right and in so many things. It’s just so impressive and so wonderful, refreshing to hear and. And I know you have a wonderfully, loyal, and educated listener base. So everyone listening, especially at this point, how long are we into this? Two hours or so, this is the top 1% of the 1% here at this point, unless people just fast forward to the end. Good for you.

[02:00:06] Ashley James: Go back. Go back and listen.

[02:00:08] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yeah, go back. It’s like, join our ranks. This is health evangelism. The more people we could reach, this is how we change the world. This is how we encourage people. This is how we take away essentially just that power that’s been robbed, that they’ve taken, in a sense stolen. And there’s not a nefarious organization we can pinpoint, but I’ll never forget when a girlfriend of my wife’s told me she wanted her power back. Meaning she bought land in Costa Rica. She got seeds like lots of seeds to start growing her own farm. She started doing things herself.

She felt disempowered by just life, by the system. She lived in Boston and it was just a very disempowering experience for her, and I will never forget though, she said, I want my power back. Wow, that was one of those indelible things. You know when you live your life and people say something? That was what, 15 years ago that she said that to me I think. And it was one of those things that I’ll never forget.

So, if you feel disempowered, then yeah, continue learning from Ashley. Be empowered, pick up my book, Essential Oils Apothecary. And I will leave you with this, folks, because unfortunately, we’ve actually talked about some things that are not in the book because I have a limit. I couldn’t write a 1000-page book. My publisher is like, oh no, the spine will break. You can only have so many. Literally, I have so many references in my book we had to shrink the font and all that. I don’t even know, I got to double check at this point. We might even need to put the references on my website.

So we created a series of demo videos that walk people through. You mentioned bone, joint disorders, like broken bones. We helped heal our son of a broken clavicle, fractured clavicle within like two and a half, three weeks. Got him out of his cast like a month ahead of time, and we have our bone strengthening remedy that we actually walk you through how to make, and then we start talking to you about some other cool stuff in our video series.

So go to eoapothecary.com to order the book but redeem our little sweet special gift bonus package. We want to help you. If you’re like me, you’re a visual learner, and a lot of people love reading, but it’s really cool to see something in action, so that’s why we created that video series, and it’s free. It’s just our gift to you. We’d appreciate it if you buy the book and then we can teach you how to get the most out of it.

This has been wonderful. It really has been. Thank you so much for having me.

[02:02:54] Ashley James: Wasn’t that wonderful? I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Eric Zielinski. You can go to learntruehealth.com/eo. That’s learntruehealth.com/eo to not only pre-order or order his book, but to also get a ton of fantastic downloads from him that he’s giving away for those who order his book through his website. So you definitely want to make sure that you get those. You don’t want to miss out by ordering from somewhere else like Amazon because you will miss out on all those awesome downloads that he’s gifting to all the listeners who go to learntruehealth.com/eo.

Please share this episode with those who care about that love essential oils or could definitely use turning hopelessness into happiness. There have been times in the last few months that I felt quite stuck, depressed, overwhelmed, and hopeless. Prayer, connection with my family, my husband, and our son, and also utilizing essential oils. Something as easy as uncapping it and taking a really deep breath of sweet orange, clary sage, or rose geranium. Taking a nice few deep breaths, applying some topically to my wrists, or putting it in the diffuser, or putting some on my clothing, my bath, or my foot bath, and just taking some deep breaths and using the essential oils to center myself, come back to now, breathe. It has helped me to get unstuck.

So, from an emotional standpoint, from a spiritual standpoint, it is helping me heal. And then essential oils are fantastic for really, day-to-day, real-world applications, improving your immune system, cuts, bruises, sleeping better, improving mood, and cranky kids. My son has some essential oils that he loves. He’s been using roll ons for a very long time and he loves them too, and he picks out his own. He particularly loves lavender.

So, it’s fun. It’s fun to use, it’s herbal medicine. It’s fun to use with the whole family, and it’s such a great remedy when we are up against it. And a lot of people are up against it this year. So it’s a fantastic gift to give to someone. Giving them a little roll on of lavender, eucalyptus, or peppermint. For muscle tension, sometimes it’s great just to center yourself, breathe, relax and bring us back into the parasympathetic nervous system of rest and digest instead of being in the fight or flight mode.

Please, share this with those you care about. We’ve got to get this information out there. Could you imagine if everyone just turned to essential oils, prayer, and connection with loved ones first before getting before going for drugs. Drugs have their place, but sometimes people go straight to drugs without trying natural medicine, and herbs in the form of essential oils are so easy to use. That’s why I love The Essential Oils Apothecary book because it’s something that we can just start little bit by little bit using, and it’s fun, and it will uplift you, and in some cases really make a huge difference.

So, whether it makes a little difference or big difference, it’s so worth it. It’s so worth just trying it, and exploring it and that’s why I love the book The Essential Oils Apothecary. So check it out, learntruehealth.com/eo, and please share this with those you care about because we can help. We can uplift each other and help each other. Thank you so much and have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.