Color Therapy

“What is Color Therapy?  Could it really work?”

You may have heard it called by various names—color therapy, colorology, chromatherapy—but all those names mean one thing—healing by exposing yourself to certain colors.

So, does color really affect your mood? And can the color of the rooms inside your house really influence your health?

What Color Therapy Really Is

In its simplest form, color therapy simply refers to the use of color to influence mood. Ever notice how many restaurants are decorated in red? Or how many bedrooms are decorated in blue? To a color expert, red is a color that stimulates the appetite while blue is peaceful and resting.

And make no mistake—color science is a very real science. Predicting what colors will be popular in automobiles, clothing and household furnishings is far more complicated that just using colors in unexpected ways. 

Taking Chromatherapy Farther

But color therapy is more than just an interesting look at human psychology. To a serious chromatherapist, color can do more than just invoke memories and influence mood. Believers in chromatherapy, an alternative therapy based on color, believe that the color surrounding you directly affects the balance of “energy” in your body.

Chromatherapists will often employ candles, color light bulbs, wands, gemstones and other items to restore this “balance of energy” in an attempt to create a “healing environment” in the body. Colorologists, as they’re sometimes called, rarely say that color actually heals. Rather, it’s the restoration of the body’s “energy balance” that allows the body’s natural healing abilities to be fully recognized. If this sounds a bit far-fetched to you, you’re not alone. Only a few studies have been published on the use of color and they mainly focused on color’s ability to influence mood.

Lisa’s Thoughts On Color Therapy

When it comes to color therapy, I have two problems. First, there’s a glaring lack of scientific evidence that color is really as powerful as some colorologists claim. Most color therapy relies on a belief in some vaguely defined “energy” or the belief in the existence of “chakras”. As open-minded as I try to be, that’s just a bit too much of a stretch for me.

Second, color is highly subjective. If your favorite color is red, for example, you may not find it as stimulating as colorologists claim. For you, it may be comforting. And someone who spent a great deal of his or her childhood in a hospital may find certain shades of green and blue—two “restful” colors—highly stressful.

So does this mean that color therapy is debunked? You tell me. Do certain colors remind you of particularly pleasant (or unpleasant) experiences?

Young Living Oils

“Would you recommend Young Living Essential Oils? Are they really a scam?”

When it comes to aromatherapy, there are few topics that get hackles up like Gary Young’s company, Young Living Essential Oils. Whether you love him or hate him, there’s no debating that he and his company have been a devisive force in the field of aromatherapy. Let’s see if we can seperate some of the facts from the hysteria.

Who Is Gary Young?

According to Young Living’s official website, youngliving.com, Gary Young suffered a “crippling injury” as a young man and this injury “launched” his career in alternative medicine. Little is know about Young although Dr. Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch.com has written rather extensivley on Young’s alleged exaggerations of his medical prowess. In its 2006 article about Young, Quackwatch cites a newspaper story on the death of Young’s newborn daughter after an apparently botched home delivery attempted by Young.

The following year, in 1983, Young was arrested in his home state of Washington for allegedly practicing medicine without a license. Young pled guilty and was sentenced to one year of probation.

Other Medical Controversies

Quackwatch goes on to list other alleged medical mis-deeds, resume exaggerations and at least one more arrest involving unproven medical devices. You can read the entire Young Living critique at the Quackwatch site.

Raindrop Therapy Controversy

Perhaps the biggest controversy surrounding Young is his use of an alternative medicine “therapy” he calls Raindrop Therapy. In this practice, various essential oils are placed undiluted—or “neat”, as aromatherapists say—onto the skin. The problem, according to anti-RT believers, is that some of the oils Young advocates using on the skin are known to act as dermal irritants and/or sensitizers. This has led many prominent practitioners of aromatherapy to call this practice “unsafe”. The National Association for Holistic Aromatherapy, for example, calls the use of dermal irritants and sensitizers by aromatherapists “unethical”.

Are these charges really founded in science? Well, the science is clear—some oils do sensitize the immune system and several of the most popular oils do contain chemical components that act as irritants when applied to the skin. But many essential oils appear far safer than some aromatherapists claim, too.  In fact, many studies on essential oils use the botanicals full-strength in experiments.  Does this make practitioners of Young’s raindrop therapy “dangerous” or “unethical”? We’ll leave that judgement up to you.

Young Living Essential Oils Today

Today, Gary Young’s official web site, youngliving.com, is devoid of most of the alleged exaggerations. His site deals mainly with the MLM (multi-level-marketing) aspect of his company and the use of essential oils as a way to “increase and maintain health of the body, mind and spirit”. Like any business marketing itself mainly through the MLM model, Young Living has both a large base of devoted followers and at least its share of critics. But does all this make Young Living a scam? Or is Gary Young’s company a convenient “whipping boy” for the aromatherapy community? You tell me.

References:

NAHA (No Copyright Listed). FAQ on Aromatherapy Safety. Retrieved from naha.org on May 19, 2008.

Barrett, S. (2006). A Critical Look at Gary Young, Young Living Essential Oils and Raindrop Therapy. Retrieved from quackwatch.com on May 19, 2008.

Young Living Essential Oils. (No Copyright Listed). Retrieved from youngliving.com on May 19, 2008.

Schubert, H., et al. (1993). Depressive episode primarily unresponsive to therapy in elderly patients; efficacy of Ginkgo biloba extract (EGb 761) in combination with antidepressants.  

Wounded Healer

“Can you tell me what people mean when they say ‘wounded healer’?” 

The idea of the “wounded healer” actually comes from the writings of psychiatrist Carl Jung, who used the term to describe therapists who identified with their patients on a deeply personal basis—usually because of similar abuse experiences.

But in natural health, the term is most often used to describe someone who became a practitioner of some type of alternative medicine because of a long-standing or very serious medical condition that modern, technology-based medicine could not effectively address.

At first glance, the idea of the wounded healer seems quite charming. After all, what could be more noble than becoming a healer in order to spare others from a similar experience? But look a bit deeper and you’ll understand why some people—and I’m included—find the idea just a tad insulting.

Ultimately, the idea of a “wounded healer” implies that only someone who has experienced a very serious (or even life-threatening) illness is fully qualified to counsel others. If that were really the case, all branches of medicine—natural and alternative—would be severely handicapped by the lack of “real” healers.

There’s little doubt that a physician who also a cancer survivor might bring a certain perspective to his practice but to take the idea of a “wounded healer” to the point of suggesting that only people with past histories of horrific abuse or triumphs over life-threatening diseases are “real” healers is insensitive and insulting.