Response to Letter to the Editor regarding "Olfactory influences on mood and autonomic, endocrine, and immune function"

We appreciated your request to respond to the critique about our recent olfactory study (Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 2008) from Kamyar M. Hedayat, MD, FAAP (Attending, Center for Complimentary Medicine, Attending, Division of Critical Care, Department of Pediatrics, Advocate Lutheran Children’s Hospital, Chicago, IL, President and Chief Medical Officer, Aroma MD, LLC) and Michael Tsifansky, MD (Attending and Director of Research, Division of Critical Care, Department of Pediatrics, Advocate Lutheran Children’s Hospital, Chicago, IL). We can understand how the critique’s first author, the president of a medical aromatherapy company, would certainly have preferred seeing more positive findings from a study such as ours. The critique suggested that we had not cited a number of clinical trials that supported the efficacy of essential oils in humans by inhalation or enteral administration. Unfortunately, empirical reports cannot exhaustively review literature and remain within the journal’s space constraints. Enteral use was well beyond the scope of our report, as was an exhaustive review of odors we had not used, leaving only one relevant positive paper in the list of references they provided, the report by Atsumi and Tonsaki. We were also faulted for not including our gas chromatography or mass spectrometry (GC/MS) data. We would have been happy to provide the data had the editor or reviewers requested it, but our article already included 7 figures. In fact, the careful characterization of essential oils by such means is theclearexception, rather than the rule in this literature (and, indeed, notably absent in the reports cited by Hedayat and Tsifansky). Hedayat and Tsifansky suggested that our choice of essential oils was based on a single book by two aromatherapists with no formal medical training; however, as we had noted in the final paragraph of our paper, we chose lemon and lavender precisely because they are widely used purported stimulant and relaxant odors, and health benefits have been repeatedly ascribed to them, particularly lavender. They note that lavender’s record for pain control is even worse than we described, and they cite additional studies that