Okay, so we'll go ahead and get started. And, again, we're talking about scientific research for aroma therapist. And I was gonna start out by talking a little bit about how I got into the field. my background is, um, pretty diverse in terms of health education. My undergrad is in environmental health, where I first really was exposed to the need for having, natural solutions from botanical medicine, herbs, and essential oils, for a lot of our common everyday problems, especially where we could
fill in the blanks where, we're kind of dropping the ball a little bit with modern medicine, especially in terms of prevention and so on. And then my, PhD candidacy is actually in essential oil research. So in addition to being the director of the Franklin Institute of Wellness, I conduct clinical trials and other research studies, meta-analysis, cohort studies, that sort of thing regularly on herbs and essential oils, in addition to getting to be the director, for NHA in the state of Tenne
ssee. And when I first started in this field, there was a little bit more separation. It was about 15 years ago, a little bit more separation than there is today between the clinical research and actual practice. And I'm a mom, and it was really important to me that we not only shared what we know from experience that essential oils can do, but that whenever I was teaching someone, or whenever I was using an oil at home with my family or with my children, that I could have the confidence and the
certainty that I really can't expect these results from my essential oils. That I have solid evidence that backs up what I say and what I'm sharing with other people. I wanted to make sure that it actually works time and time and time again, that it was predictable. And I also wanted aromatherapy to have an advocate in the scientific world so that we could integrate what we know in the scientific world with public health epidemiology and clinical trials and research studies with what we know to
be the case from traditional aromatherapy education and training. And we've done a really good job of marrying the two fields when it comes to chemistry. We've integrated chemistry into aromatherapy training. A lot of therapists use chemistry, and I really wanna see that happen in some of the other scientific fields as well, with public health, with epidemiology, and especially with clinical research. And so that's why I advocate so heavily for having clinical research. And what I wanna do toni
ght is kind of take you behind the scenes a little bit. So I want you to just kind of imagine that I'm bringing you into my office, and we're gonna brew a cup of tea, turn on the diffuser, put some of our favorite oils in, and chat about research and what that actually means to you, whether you're a professional aromatherapist with a thriving practice, or whether you've just gotten started on this aromatherapy journey. So step number one, what we're gonna be looking at is finding information. an
ytime we start talking about, you know, going and doing your research, then we get on the internet. That's what we do in, in this day and age, and we find an abundance of information. Some of it's great, some of it's not so great. And the first thing we have to do is figure out what can we trust? What is reliable and what is not so reliable? So we're gonna talk about different types of resources that you might find when you're on the internet looking for evidence about essential oils and their e
fficacy. there are four types of sources that we will typically use, and these are in a hierarchy with primary sources being at the top. And then secondary sources, tertiary sources and popular press articles. Primary sources are going to be those sources that are written or delivered from the researcher directly, and they're usually gonna be referee. We're typically gonna find these in a journal in PubMed, somewhere like that. A secondary source is very similar. These are summaries and compilat
ions of research that are developed for experts in the field. And then we shift a little bit. We transition, primary and secondary sources are by researchers. For researchers. We move over to information that's written for other people in the field, whether they're professionals or whether they're lay people, people who are not researchers by trade. And here we get tertiary sources, which are articles and overviews that are frequently, although not always written by researchers. And then we ha
ve popular press articles, which really kinda run the gamut of, of quality in terms of what we're going to find. So you're gonna find articles online of all shapes and sizes. You're gonna find some primary sources, some popular press articles. It's important to kind of right off the bat, look at them and figure out where they fit into this hierarchy. And it's important to point out that, you know, finding out that something is a primary source doesn't automatically make it, you know, flawless. A
nd finding out that something is a popular press article doesn't automatically mean that it's junk. It simply means that we're gonna have to use a different set of criteria as we're moving further away from the primary source in terms of evaluating overall quality. So the first two that we'll start talking about are the primary and the secondary sources. And again, these are typically gonna be written by researchers for researchers. So there's gonna be some key things that we see here when we're
talking about primary sources. Then we're looking at original research sourced directly from the researcher. So this is directly from the horse's mouth. This is the person who conducted the research, who has access to the data, who knows those data like the back of their hand, who analyzed it, who really, you know, spearheaded the research study. And they're gonna be multiple primary researchers for any given scientific study because as we'll talk about later on tonight, research is, is not a o
ne man or one woman show. It is a, it's a team effort. we'll typically find these primary sources in peer reviewed journals, thesis dissertations, and sometimes even conference proceedings. And the key thing here is that our primary sources are factual. They're not interpreted. And so what that means is that we don't get any translation here. We're going directly to the source. What did the data have to say? And we can take it and we can interpret it directly ourselves. Secondary sources are p
retty close to that. If they have some interpretation, they're fully referenced with primary sources, and they're basically summarizing or synthesizing knowledge for other scientists or researchers. So we can find this sometimes in textbooks, but we frequently find it in scientific journals when we're looking at review articles. And again, sometimes we can find this in conference proceedings as well. I've got a couple of examples of each of these type of source that if you want to look up exampl
es afterwards, you can, and you can find these in the, the printout, PDF, that, you're gonna be sent afterwards, on our website. There's a great example of primary article, a meta analysis that we conducted last year. and then in our student resource library, um, you can also find an example of a secondary article, which would be a literature review. So it's not a a research study, it's actually summarizing other research studies. And that's the distinction there. When we shift over a little b
it further away from the source, we get to tertiary sources. Tertiary sources are basically where we're taking the research and we're translating those findings into plain English, but we're interpreting the results. So these are typically written either for a lay audience or for scientists who work in different fields, because there are a lot of different researchers with a lot of different areas of expertise and specialty. and I can write something and someone else who's incredibly intelligent
and also a researcher, but in a different field, might not necessarily be able to utilize that sufficiently unless it's translated a little bit, for someone outside of my field to read. So that's where we're getting these tertiary sources. And the key here is that we do see some translation happening. We'll find these typically in trade magazines or blogs, high quality blogs, blogs that are actually putting good articles out. Um, and we'll typically see them referred to as research, but it'
s using the more traditional term of, definition of research, where we're talking about finding existing information and summarizing it, not necessarily the way that we refer to scientific research, where we're actually finding new information, which we're gonna talk about later on. we can find a lot of blogs and articles and resources that are called original research, but they're actually popular press articles of tertiary sources. So it's important to make that distinction. if we're talking
about an original research study that found new information, that's gonna be a primary source. if we're talking about research that is compiling existing information, that's gonna be a tertiary source. also article abstracts. If we're looking at original research, but we don't have the full study and we're just looking at the abstract, then we actually would not necessarily refer to that as a primary source because it doesn't have all of the information that we need. And we're gonna gonna talk
a little bit more about abstracts, in another section, but I wanna go ahead and introduce you to that concept that it is separate from the study itself. Textbooks are also really common tertiary sources. Here we are summarizing and consolidating primary and secondary data so that we can teach students, and they'll typically refer to that primary and secondary, resource are a step down from the primary and secondary information is because we've added a tier, we've moved one step away from the s
ource, and we're introducing the issue of interpretation. So when we move from a primary source into a tertiary source, we have someone here who's translating the information for us, and we have to make sure that we are vetting our interpreter or the author of the, the information that we're looking at the textbook or the article, or, you know, the blog post, whatever that might be. We have to make sure that they're qualified to interpret research and that they're interpreting it accurately. Whe
n we get closer to the source, we don't have that concern because we're looking exactly at what the data have to say. But as we move away, we've introduced these layers now where we need to vet the information we're receiving, and we also need to vet the person delivering the information to see, you know, what other things are, are being added here. Just as we would, if we were going to another country where they speak a language that we don't know, we would look for someone to interpret or to t
ranslate for us, but we would also need to make sure that they're translating everything correctly so that we can make sure we get the complete picture that someone is trying to communicate to us. It's the same sort of concept here. So here's a really good example of a tertiary article that you can also find on our website. And I wanna point out why this is a tertiary article and not a primary source, because when we look at this, I wrote the article, and so it's written by a researcher. It incl
udes primary sources, but it is not written for fellow researchers. It includes definitions of research methodology, and it uses plain English. So that makes it a, a tertiary article versus a primary or a secondary source. So there's the distinction there. You have not only the information, in this article, but you have my personal interpretation of that information that you're getting there as well. From there, we move on into popular press articles. Now, here's where we have to be incredibly
picky with what we're looking at, and we really have to really focus our attention on not just the information, but also the delivery method of what we're getting. So in addition to our primary or secondary and our tertiary sources, we have, additional trade magazines, additional types of blog posts. and the difference here, is going to be in the, the quality of information that we're getting. These are written for enthusiasts for non researchers, and they're often written by enthusiasts, are
by non researchers. They may contain academic citations like tertiary sources, or they may contain citations to tertiary sources. They may not even contain citations at all. The quality here is really going to vary depending upon the author, and that's where we have to get really picky and start examining who wrote this article? are they qualified to interpret this? what other, you know, conflicts of interest might exist? What other things do we need to take in mind while we're looking at the i
nformation as a whole? So we can't go directly to those claims. Another important thing to look at when we're talking about popular press articles would be the sources. It's becoming incredibly common for people to cite their work. we find that now pretty frequently, even if we're looking at, you know, a blog article or a blog post or even social media posts, we'll frequently have citations under them. And we've been trained a little bit to look at an article and then skimm down to the bottom an
d make sure that we see a lot of good citations. And if we do, then it's an evidence-based article, and we kind of drop our blinders at that point and go directly into it and accept it at face value. And that's not exactly what we need to be doing in terms of vetting something to make sure that it's evidence-based. There's a very common habit of including all of these citations at the bottom that are either not legitimate citations, maybe they're citations to other popular press sources, or to,
magazine articles or to just regular, popular press books versus citing actual, you know, primary sources. Citations should take us a step closer to the primary source. There's also a really common habit now of not citing the author's main point. And we have an article on our website about how to vet, different, you know, posts and articles and things like that that you might find some, some steps to look for. But just a really quick summary of that. Some of the things that we wanna look for i
s, first of all, is the author here qualified to interpret research. And a really easy way to tell is to look for graduate degrees that are in a research field. interpreting research is not something that we can, necessarily attain. It's just self-taught. It's something that takes years and years of education to look at all of the different variables and all of the different factors. So skimming really quickly to make sure, that they're actually qualified to interpret what it is that they're int
erpreting. Then we wanna look at the citations themselves. Are these two primary sources, secondary sources or not? and that's also gonna be a really quick giveaway that this thing is posing as an evidence-based article, but it isn't quite an evidence-based article if we find a lot of resources listed at the bottom, but they're not taking us a step closer to the actual source. And then finally, are the citations related to the main point? A really good example of this would be, the frequent clai
m that we see that Frank since cures cancer. So we can find an article that frankincense is curing all the cancer, and we can find a dozen citations at the bottom, and we can jump to the conclusion this is evidence based. But then when we start looking at those citations and seeing what is actually being substantiated here, what we might find is that the definition of cancer is cited. Well, we didn't necessarily need that to be cited. That's common knowledge. And so by basic academic rules, we d
on't have to cite common knowledge. And when we get to the main claims, what we find is that they're not necessarily substantiated. We won't see the main claim in one of these ground making articles that goes viral substantiated, even if there are 8, 10, 12 citations at the bottom. So we don't wanna just look for those citations, we wanna evaluate the quality of those citations and make sure they're taking us closer to the original source. And we also wanna make sure that they're substantiating
the major claim, the overall claim of the article, not just throwing in random citations in an attempt to distract you from the main point that they're making. So as you're going through these different articles that you find, as you, as you're going out there and you're researching and you're looking for information, some easy quick ways that you can look at something and say, okay, what kind of source is this? How picky do I need to be? How you know deeply? How much in depth do I need to vet t
he article, the author, the sources, the citations, so on and so forth. Here's a quick cheat sheet of questions that you can ask as you're going through. You can just skim through them. Was it written for other researchers or was it written for enthusiasts? Does the article include interpretations or just the facts? Does the article cover a research study or does it cover a summary of information giving out on a topic? What types of sources do we find in the citations? And then was the author ac
tually the person who's the researcher who conducted that study? And those are some quick giveaways that'll tell us where it fits. And the purpose for this, again, is to get us as close as possible to the original source, because the further we get from the primary source, the greater the chance of that game of telephone that we all played in grade school, where we tell someone next to us a secret, and they tell it to the person next to them. And we go around the circle, and by the time it gets
from one end of the circle to the other, I want to eat pizza has turned into let's go roller skating because we've had so many modifications and so many levels of misunderstanding. So what we are really wanting here, the reason that we want to see what kind of article we're looking at is we wanna see how close to the original source we can get so that we remove those layers, those barriers that are in between us and the original source. And anytime we do have layers between us, we wanna make sur
e that we've vetted them, that they're trustworthy and that they're qualified to actually be interpreting this information for us. So let's say we've gone in, we found an article, we've asked these questions, and we figured out this is a primary source or a secondary source, then what? Now we're gonna move into consuming these studies that we find. And of course, we have to start by talking about PubMed. PubMed is the card catalog of scientific research. So PubMed does not publish studies, it do
esn't produce original research, and it's not actually a source, it's an index. So just like you go to the back of a textbook and you can look up a word and it'll tell you where to find it, you can find it on this page and that page and that whole section, that's what PubMed does. We can look up a keyword, we can look up certain factors that we want to research, and it'll tell us which journals have published articles that are related to that. It's only going to index scientific journals. So a l
ot of our trade journals are not necessarily going to be included. So when we're looking at trade journals, then we're gonna have to, you know, go back and look at some other criteria here to make sure that we're still talking about primary sources, because everything we find in a journal is not necessarily going to be a primary source. Some of the articles that are indexed in scientific journals or trade journals might be letters to the editor. They may be literature reviews, they might be orig
inal research case studies or clinical trials. they could also be educational in nature where they're gonna be more along the lines of a textbook. So we're getting a lot of different types of article. So just because we find it on PubMed or we find it in a journal, doesn't necessarily make it a primary source. So it's important to keep in mind that what we find on PubMed, PubMed is an index. It's giving us directions. It's not a scientific journal. Another thing to keep in mind when you're looki
ng through PubMed for articles is that we want our information to be current, especially for, we're talking about something such as public health. If we're talking about microbes, we really need current information. Microbes change over time. and we see that a lot in mainstream medicine. The antibiotics that we used 20 years ago are not sufficient to fight the microbes that we're dealing with today because of resistance. So we need to make sure that the information we're looking at is still rele
vant to the issues that we're facing today when the environment and the microbes and all of these other factors have changed over time. So the general rule of thumb is that we want something to be published within the last five years, and PubMed actually has a handy little, box that you can check on the side where you can click. I want stuff that's only within the last five years or within the last 10 years. Anything going beyond 10 years is really not going to be considered current unless it'
s a landmark study. Now, we use landmark studies because they define certain things, they've achieved certain things or they've defined certain conditions. For example, one of the research studies I did was on probiotics and colic and infant colic. And I cited a study from the 1950s because that's where we defined the criteria for colic. And we haven't changed it since then. That's still current, it's still relevant even though it's from the 1950s. So that was one of these landmark studies tha
t was an exception to that rule. Um, but as a general rule, we wanna go within the last five years, sometimes as much as 10. And there are certain instances, in academia where we actually wanna only go two years if we're talking about a really saturated topic or a topic where there's been an, an abundance of research that's been published recently. So you've gone to PubMed, you've found a study. It's, let's say it's a primary secondary source. It's current, it's relevant. Now what I'm gonna ta
ke you step by step through the process of reading the different components, the different sections of a clinical trial or of a scientific research study, the first thing that we're gonna see is the abstract. Now the abstract is like the back cover of a book. a really good abstract is gonna contain the crucial bits, although sometimes we'll see that, there are things that are omitted. for example, we were just, Kelly and I were talking earlier about how sometimes it won't say the exact essenti
al oils that were used. Um, but as a general rule, it's, it's gonna be like the back cover of a book. But because it's only containing these crucial bits, because it's sometimes leaving out really important information like which essential oils were used, then we also wanna make sure that we get the entire study because we can't just recommend it by the back of its cover. just like we couldn't recommend a book by the back of its cover, there are also sometimes going to be outcomes that maybe t
he authors found to be mundane. But depending upon how you wanna use that research, it might be really important. negative effect sizes are usually not included in the abstract. or there might be certain moderator or confounding variables that are included in the research study, but not the abstract. But depending upon how you wanna use the study, these could be really important, really crucial findings. So this is where we're gonna start, but it's certainly not where we're going to finish. We'r
e gonna move from there into the beginning of the study, which is the introduction or the background. Now, the purpose of an introduction to a study is to answer the question, who cares? and I will be the first to admit that sometimes researchers have fascinations and curiosities that nobody really cares about. And so the first thing we have to do is explain to you why this is important. What does this contribute? Why does this matter? And that's what the introduction and the background is, is t
his is where we take you in and say, okay, this is what we know from the literature. Here's the problem that we need to address. Here's the research question. Here's why this is important so that you have an interest in the actual topic that we're gonna be studying. It doesn't reflect the author's own scientific research as it relates to the study. it's putting the study in the context of the literature as a whole. So what that means is that what we're finding here is not a primary source. We wo
uld not cite a research article based upon something that was said in this section. We would actually follow that, citation and go further into the literature. So if you're interested in, let's say, essential oils for ear infections, and you find a study on ear infections, and let's say choosing an essential oil, that introduction and background is not where you're getting your conclusions, but it's a really great way to find what other research has been done in this area. And you can skip rig
ht over to the citation section and you can pull up all of those studies and you can keep going. And as you can imagine, it can quickly turn an afternoon project into a several months long project as you start following all of these leads that you find. So it's a really great place to do additional research, but it's not something you would actually cite an article with what you find. This is literally just setting the stage. Who cares? Why should you care about the research that I conducted? Wh
y was this needed? Why is this a valuable contribution to science? From there, we move on into the actual research that is the purpose of the article. And here we get to the methods. Now, the biggest novice mistake here is to start critiquing the methodology. The methods are not up here for us to necessarily critique. The methods are up here to explain how this study was conducted so that you know how to interpret the findings. because again, this is written by researchers for researchers. So fo
r example, if I'm conducting research on essential oils and anxiety, I'm gonna pull other research studies on essential oils and anxiety. And I'm gonna look at the methods that they used. What have they used, what measurement instruments have they used? What populations have they evaluated? What methodology did they use? What sample sizes did they have? And I'm going to use that to develop my own research. The second reason is reproducibility. Essentially as a researcher, I should be able to tak
e any study out there and follow the methods the way that they explain them and come up with the same results. And that's how we know something is evidence-based. And this is why we don't ever use a single study to substantiate a claim. This is why we live for the whole body of literature, because if the findings were accurate, then any other researcher can use the same methodology and have the same outcome. So that's why the method section is in there, is to provide all of the context that you
need, essentially setting the groundwork, setting the framework for what we're gonna find in this study, and also so that it can be reproduced so that we can validate its findings. From there, we move into the re results in the discussion, and this is where we actually see what happened. So methods showed us what they did that showed us what happened as a result of what they did. This is an important section of the study. This is where we're actually gonna see some of the data outputs, some of t
he graphs, some of the charts that are coming from the statistical software. we're gonna find all of the outcomes of the study without that personal interpretation. This is why we call them primary sources. 'cause we're going directly to the research. This is what this sample found, here's the information about that, and here's where we can really get in and analyze something and determine if it's relevant to us, if it's something we can use in our practice, if it's something we can use in our f
amily and in our home. And then the discussion section is also gonna include some of the reflections of the researcher by putting those findings into context. So here we're kind of coming full circle all the way around to that framework we set at the beginning that who cares? So at the beginning we said, here is the existing state of knowledge about this topic. Here's what I did, here's what I found, and here's how this integrates in with the state of knowledge about this particular topic. Now,
it's important to keep in mind that these results are gonna be applicable to this particular sample. The method section tells us how much this is applicable to other populations, and that's something that we know by reading the method section. They used this sample, they randomized in this way, this was, the population they drew from, and that information we can use to figure out how much this applies to others. And then typically we're gonna conclude from there with statements of conflicts of
interest, if there's anything that needs to be declared. And the limitation section, the limitation section is another one that we tend to get hung up on quite a bit. And it's important to note that the limitation section is simply stating the obvious. All of this information can be found in the method section. If we're reading through the method section thoroughly, then we should be, we're pointing it back out. These are not flaws that are in a particular study. These are the parameters that w
e can use to interpret the findings. And this is something that we run into, throughout life. If I choose to go right, one of my limitations is that I can't go left. If I were to invite you out to dinner and say, we're gonna go to an Italian restaurant, one of the limitations is going to be that you probably can't order tacos. Not if it's a good Italian restaurant anyway. It's not a place to go and get a burrito and a margarita and some really good queso. That's gonna be a limitation of choosi
ng to go to an Italian restaurant. It doesn't mean that the Italian restaurant is flawed. it simply means that by choosing this set of methodology, these are the particular limitations that are inherent to this research process. Studies that actually have significant flaws in them. When the process works the way that it should, they fail peer review, they don't get published, or if they make it through, they get retracted. Or if they make it through, they don't get reproduced because again, we s
hould be able to take the method section and reproduce those findings. And that's why we use, again, the entire body of literature. We wanna see multiple studies conducted on a topic with the same outcome or even better. We wanna see a meta analysis where we've put all those studies together and analyzed them. So we're looking here at what the entire body of literature has to say. So those are the different sections that we're going to go through. Now, as you're going through each of those secti
ons, a couple of other temptations might be to use regular everyday definitions for some of the language that we find in those particular sections. And it's really important, to keep in mind that research terminology differs a little bit from regular everyday language because articles about research studies, again, are written by researchers for researchers. Then there's a little bit of an assumption here that we're also speaking the same language kind of, um, slang, if you will. So the articl
e itself is written in English, and we actually have definitions for a lot of the terms that are being used, but the terminology might as well be a different language because we are defining a lot of these terms in a very, very different way. So we're gonna have to learn some new meanings of some commonly used terms that we use in everyday language. And this is especially important when we're looking at primary and secondary sources. We can't read them with the same assumptions or with the same
interpretations that we would if we were reading a tertiary or a popular press source. This is another reason it's really important to figure out what type of source we're looking at at the beginning so that we can know how to interpret some of these words. Because if we're looking at, a tertiary or a popular press source, then we're gonna interpret those words, understanding that they mean what they do in everyday language. if we're looking at a primary or a secondary source, we're gonna use
a different interpretation for some of those words. The first one that we're gonna talk about is proof. In everyday language. Proof reflects legal definitions where a concept has been established as an indisputable fact. In the research world, proof is a red flag. it's used quite a bit in pseudoscience. it's not something that we necessarily, use when we're talking about a research study, not one that was originally written in English. A new way. Scientific studies provide evidence that supports
a specific concept, but no scientific study ever proves anything. When you see a claim that something was proven to work, this substance was proven to do that thing, you're probably watching a pharmaceutical commercial. That's where we have learned to expect something to be proven to work. And we all know how that works out for us. When we see that word, you can know that someone's either trying to sell you something or that they're misinformed themselves. So always consider it a red flag eithe
r way, no matter what the intent is. This is an indicator that you should be cautious if you run into this type of language whenever you're reading an article that you find, regardless of the type of article that you found. The next one is bias. In everyday language bias refers to unreasonable judgment or personal or subjective outlooks. In a scientific study, bias has nothing to do with personal opinions or subjective outlooks. In a scientific study, bias refers to any sort of potential for e
rror that could lead to inaccurate results. It does not reflect the researcher's personal opinion, and its inherent to the methodological process that we've selected. So every different type of research is prone to certain types of bias. For example, if I'm conducting a case control study, that type of study is one where we start with a group of cases. Maybe we start with a group of people who have a cancer, and then we gather a group of controls, a group of individuals who are the exact same in
dividuals, but they don't have cancer. Everything else is the same. And then we work backwards over time to begin evaluating some of the different exposures that they've had. And we're looking for patterns here. It's a retrospective study. So what that means is that it's subject to recall bias. Anytime we're going back in history, then we're gonna have a problem with recall bias. Someone is going to remember something wrong, or someone's medical records might have been written wrong. Are there a
ny number of of errors here that we can find as a result of that? That's the type of bias that we would find in the study because it could lead to the wrong conclusions from this particular sample. It doesn't mean that the researcher cares one way or the other what the outcome is, or that the researcher is trying to sway the outcome in one way or another. It means that the data themselves have bias. So in everyday terminology, bias is something that people have in research bias is something that
data may have. And again, each method has its own risk of bias. There's not a methodology that is bias proof. That's one of the things that we've learned when we're learning how to conduct researches. If you choose this methodology or that methodology, here are the types of bias you need to be aware of. And here's how you need to, control your study, how you need to adjust your study, how you need to analyze these data to avoid that as much as possible, to make sure that we've accounted for t
hat. The next word that we're gonna look at is validity. In everyday language, validity refers to ideas or a concept as being justifiable or reasonable. This is a valid idea. This is a valid approach. But in scientific research, it refers to the ability of a measurement instrument to measure what we think it's measuring. Does this pedometer truly measure how many steps I am taking when I walk throughout the day? And if you have one of those pedometers on your cell phone, you know there's a reall
y good chance it probably doesn't, especially if we've ever walked in a group and then compared afterwards, this one says, I got so and so many steps. And that one says we got half that many steps. and we learned very quickly that where we carry the phone or how we take our steps and all those other things can affect how that pedometer is. What we're talking about there is validity. And it's important that we validate any measurement instrument that we're using in a study. So we wanna know, is t
his pedometer actually counting the number of steps that I have taken? does this test or this assessment truly discriminate between competency and incompetency? Does this participant's understanding of a survey question really match the outcome that we're studying? This is something that's critical to the field of aromatherapy, whether we're talking about aromatherapy certification or whether we're talking about surveys that we take online, whether we're talking about scientific research, a scho
ol certification or exam or any sort of organizational certification exam has to be constantly studied and revised depending upon the total numbers of people taking a test. Typically annually, or even more frequently, again, depending upon how many people are taking a test. And we use certain types of analysis such as item discrimination. Does this question on this certification exam truly discriminate between who's competent and who's not competent? Does it legitimately fail the people who shou
ld fail and pass the people who should pass? And legitimacy here is, you know, when we're referring to validity as legitimacy, we're not referring to is this a valid question? is this actually a question that an aromatherapist should know We're referring to, does this question actually discriminate between a qualified aromatherapist and someone who's not qualified? And this is something that you've probably run into before. If you've ever taken a college entrance exam, the A CT or a GRE, you kno
w that when you're taking those standardized tests, you take the actual questions that that they're asking of you, and then you also take kind of a dummy test, and you don't know which one is the dummy test. That is actually this process in action. They're validating those test questions before they actually use them. They're making sure that those questions actually discriminate before they actually began using them to try and discriminate between different levels of achievement. Here we also u
se this in clinical trials. If I'm conducting a survey for my study, then we need to make sure that my participants understand what my questions mean in the same way that I do. So if I ask you a question, I might mean it one way, but depending upon your culture, your background, your family of origin, any number of factors, you may actually interpret those words differently. And the answer you give me might not actually reflect the question that I think that I'm asking you. And so we have to val
idate these surveys to make sure that we're actually measuring what we think that we're measuring, that the pedometer that we're using actually measures the number of steps, that it's not just giving us a random number or that the data is actually measuring what we think it's going to measure. So those are some key words to look for. And of course, there are a lot of other words that are, that are defined differently. not so much in plain English, but these are the three that I run into the most
frequently, in the field of aromatherapy, at least, recently. Now, the next thing that we're going to look at here, part four, is actually putting all of this into action. So up to this point, we've discussed how to conduct, regular research, research, that we would use, you know, in the academic setting for school, finding existing information, putting it all together, and, you know, applying it to a situation either to our professional practice, to our families, to ourselves, whatever
that might be. We're gonna shift a little bit here. We're gonna talk about scientific research for this final part. How do we discover new information that has never existed before? How do we answer the process of scientific research that we engage in, when we conduct research studies or when we conduct clinical trials? And we're gonna talk about how you can get involved in this type of research, but we're gonna start by looking at the overall process. Now, as we do, I want to remind you that r
esearch is a team effort. No one conducts research individually. So we're gonna talk about a lot of different steps and a lot of different processes. and I don't want any of them to be intimidating or overwhelming because there's definitely a way that everyone can get involved in research because again, it's a team effort. No one person actually completes all of these steps on their own. So we're gonna start here at the very beginning. The first thing we do if we wanna conduct research is we don
't actually just dive in and start handing people surveys or, start giving people placebos and interventions. that's actually a really common question that we get as we'll. Talk about a clinical trial that we're conducting and someone will say, yeah, but has it started yet? Um, well by, has it started yet? Most people are referring to have people actually gotten the placebo or the intervention yet? but a research study actually begins several years prior to that. one of the clinical trials tha
t we're currently conducting. We just started recruiting participants this summer. but it actually took three years to get to that stage, three years of background research because the topic was so complex. So what we do is we began with a background and literature review. What is everything that we already know about this topic? Every single thing that we can possibly find in the literature about this topic. And as I mentioned earlier, once we start following the citations in a research study,
this is a process that can take months because we follow those citations and then we follow those citations, and then we follow those citations, and then we do new, searches on PubMed, and we follow all of those citations and we have thousands and thousands of abstracts that we're skimming to determine what we need to be looking for. But we have to make sure that we have the full picture, everything that we know about this topic so that we can make sure we're legitimately contributing to the f
ield. And then we have to ask ourselves, what are the next reasonable steps? So that's something that this, this process itself can sometimes take a year or more, depending upon the complexity of a situation. And then we ask ourselves what questions still need to be answered? So what do we still not know? Because again, the purpose here is to answer a question that's never been answered before. We wanna find out something that we did not already know that nobody knows, and that we can't find the
answer to anywhere. Once we know what question needs to be answered, that's going to dictate to us what type of research study we're going to conduct. Because each type of question lends itself to a certain research process. We don't just pick whatever methodology we like to work with. We have to choose the methodology that is appropriate to the question. just like if you were going to bake a cake, you would pick, especially if you're gonna use a cake mix, for example, you wouldn't pick the a
ngel food cake mix. If you're going for a chocolate cake, you pick the chocolate cake mix. So whatever question we want to answer will tell us what type of methodology we need to use, and then that's going to really answer the question of the entire research design. Everything from the sample size to how long the intervention is gonna last, how the intervention's going to be administered. All of that is dictated by the question that we wanna answer, and we conduct other analysis here as well. Fo
r example, if we wanna know how many people we need in a study, we don't just say the more the merrier. How many can we get? We actually have to conduct an analysis of how our analysis to figure out how many we need to answer this question based upon what has already been discovered in the scientific literature. And that power analysis will tell us for this question, you need 40 people for that one, you're gonna need 4,000 people. the the question that we ask is going to tell us all of this info
rmation. So we designed the entire study on the backend, we put the whole outline together, all of the framework together, quietly in the background. Then we have to go through some oversight committees. We have some compliance issues here that we have to address. The first one we have to do is go through an ethics committee. This is an independent, accredited agency, that provides authorization after it audits every single bit of that research proposal. Is this study safe and beneficial to th
e participants? Why do you need this many people? Why do you need the intervention to last this long? Why are you collecting this information from their health history? And they determine if it's truly gonna be beneficial or if it's not. And every single research study that's conducted in the US has this ethics committee authorization, and every country has its own ethics committee. We use IRBs in the us but every country has its own procedure set in place. And these things are accredited by the
FDA or the equivalent in each individual country. And then we also have to register our research. we have to register it with appropriate governing organizations to make sure that we're complying with all those requirements and these processes are in place to protect participants. Decades ago before we had these processes in place, researchers took advantage of a lot of people. And you may have even heard of some of these issues previously. the Tuskegee experiment, for example. these things pro
tect individuals from any sort of harm that may happen to them while we are furthering the field of knowledge and what we actually know. So we have to go through this, and this can also take quite a while depending upon the complexity of the study and the population that we wanna work with. From there, we move on into preparation. And here's where that measurement validation comes back into play. if the instrument has not already been validated with this particular population recently, then we h
ave to validate that measurement instrument. Does this answer what I think is answering, or am I using a ruler to measure flour for a cake? Because we have so many measurement instruments that we use in health research, we have to make sure that we have the correct one to answer the question that we're asking. and this is another process where we conduct, kind of tiny little research studies in the midst of one big overarching research process. And a really good example of this would be, let's
say I wanna take a survey and I wanna know how many people have been harmed by an essential oil. So I just wanna ask the question. You know, what is your, your name, your age, your sex, your race, and have you ever been harmed by an essential oil? Seems easy enough, yes, no, let's collect a whole bunch of data and decide if essential oils are harmful. How do we define harmed? Are we referring to physical harm? Do we also include emotional harm? What if, what if I drop the bottle of essential oi
l on my toe? Do do I put yes because I was harmed by an essential oil? But I mean, it was kind of the bottle that harmed me, not the oil. Or, you know, what if this oil was just triggery to me? I didn't like the scent. It gave me a headache. I I just really felt uncomfortable. Does that count as harmed, or are you looking for, I drank a bottle of oil and had to go to the hospital. all of a sudden it's not so clear. define essential oil. Can we also include CO2 extracts? Or what if the essential
oil is in a lotion? What if it's a lotion that contains essential oil? Or what if I think it's an essential oil, but it's actually adulterated? What if it's a synthetic product that's being sold to me as an essential oil? Does that count? all of a sudden we have a lot of other parameters, a lot of other issues. And even have I been harmed? Well, am I answering on behalf of myself or my underage minor children for whom I am their legal representation? All of a sudden things get really, really m
uddy. And if we ask that question to 500, 600, a thousand people, we're gonna have dozens, if not hundreds of individuals who are not answering the question the way that we meant it when we asked it. And so validation helps us to make sure that when we ask a question, we're actually asking what we think we're asking, and that our audience understands that question in the way that we think that we're asking it. And then we have to basically go back to the drawing board. Does anything need to chan
ge? Let's say we validate our measurement instrument and all of a sudden now we're gonna need a totally different sample size. So we're gonna need to do this. We're gonna need to update our IRB, we have to then resubmit all of these things and essentially start over. So lots of effort there, lots of energy there. And then we get to start working with people. This is where most people see research start. Here's where we actually get to start recruiting individuals. but even then, we can't just
hand out placebos and interventions. We have to get informed consent. We have to make sure that we fully communicate it to every single participant exactly how long it's gonna take. So if I wanna ask an inter an internet survey, I have to let you know this is gonna take between five and 10 minutes and it might ask some personal questions. And by completing it online, of course, you're at risk of a data breach. I have to be very clear with you upfront about every single bit of discomfort you migh
t experience and every single risk you might experience. I can't just assume that you've thought of all of those things that you know that entering your information online may or may not be safe, or that you know that by asking a question, about essential oils, we might talk about your health history. I have to be upfront with all of it, and you have to agree to it before I can begin asking you questions or before I can ship you an intervention or a placebo or whatever it might be. Then we do th
e intervention after we've made sure that you agree fully, willingly, without any sort of coercion and that you fully understand that you could quit the study at any time, should you choose to, and your information will be discarded. Then we go to the intervention. Now, not all studies have an intervention. There are a lot of research studies that don't have an intervention. Um, we've kind of adapted this approach that clinical trial is the gold standard and the best research, but that's not nec
essarily the case. if we're asking a question about the risks of essential oils, for example, if that's our research question, we might not have an actual intervention involved in that study. But when we do, here's where it fits in. And then we have all of our data, and this is where it gets really fun, from the researcher perspective. We have all of this information, a big data set full of information. Here are all the pieces to the puzzle that will answer that question that we set out to answe
r that no one has ever answered before. And we analyze it and we analyze it based upon processes that are dictated by a study design. So if we decide we're gonna conduct a meta analysis, for example, there is a specific protocol that we use, there's a a specific process that we use to evaluate that we can't just again, throw it in our software and pick what we wanna do until we find something significant. We actually have to make it meaningful. And then we get to share all of that with everyon
e, everyone else. There's where we public, publish our results or we present them at a conference. and data analysis and presentation are, are typically gonna be ongoing. We can always go back and reanalyze a data set or ask new questions of it and present new findings from a data set. And that's something that for a researcher can continue on indefinitely for years. Um, so there's a lot of different steps in this process, a lot that actually, takes place as we're going through it. But one t
hing that I really wanna point out here is that let's say we wanna conduct some research, we wanna ask this question that hasn't been asked before. You know, does this essential oil harm people or does this essential oil benefit people? We can't just head out, develop a survey or develop an intervention and start collecting information from the general public, even if they're more than happy to provide it to us, which a lot of people are ethically, we cannot go out there and do that. We have to
go through the process of first of all, developing a legitimate, study so that we can make sure that our findings are actually meaningful. And then we have to make sure that we go through those ethics committee guidelines. The guiding rule in research is the protection of human participants. And as researchers, this is actually a distinct training that we get that's separate from, our research degrees and whatnot. This is a separate training that we get from the National Institute of Health
as it's actually updated on a regular basis, and it ensures that we protect our participants above all else. We are not entitled to anyone's health history, to anyone's medical information or even to their opinions for research purposes. I'm not entitled to your thoughts about antibiotics, just because I'm a researcher, I have to actually have a really good reason for asking you for that information. I have to be able to justify that. And it can't just be my opinion. I can't just decide it. Yeah
, I've justified it. I have a really good reason. I have to have that ethics committee agree that yes, this is a valid reason. And the way they're gonna make that determination is based upon something called the Belmont Report. and there are three key criteria here that they're looking for. First of all, respect for persons honesty and transparency from me. I can't tell you it's gonna take 10 minutes to complete the survey. If I know good and well, it's gonna take you 20, 30 minutes to finish it
. I have to actually tell you ahead of time, this is how much of your time I'm gonna take up for my research. Are you willing to give me that amount of time to tell me more about your thoughts on this particular subject? Or I'm going to be bothering you to this extent with this intervention. Are you willing to provide that to me for the benefit of science. and I have to be honest and transparent with you about that. I also have to be honest and transparent with you about the risks. the risks are
always going to be there. There is not a single intervention, even if I just throw up a question. Have you ever been hurt by, Bergam oil? Anyone that's been hurt, fill out the survey. There are risk associated with that. You might get into that survey and maybe you've had a traumatic experience with that essential oil, and I'm asking you some pretty invasive questions, that are psychologically traumatizing to you. Maybe it's bringing up an event that you didn't necessarily plan on talking a
bout, or maybe I'm getting into your medical history, and there's potential for a data breach there. Or maybe I'm just taking up your afternoon and I didn't tell you I was gonna be taking up your whole afternoon. I have to always tell you what those risks are, and you have to agree to them before we can't just simply go collect information, even if we feel like that information is no big deal. The second one is, do no harm. Can this study be conducted with fewer participants? What is the smalles
t number of people that we need to answer this research question so that we're not just bothering a whole bunch of people unnecessarily? do we really need to be this invasive with the questions that we ask or with the depth of their medical history or with the depth of the intervention? Do we really need every single element of this study? Is all of this necessary to answer this research question? And then finally, we're looking at making sure we're not exploiting anyone that we're acting justly
. Fair distribution of cost and benefits. Does everyone benefit equally here, or am I preying upon someone who's an easy target? Am I coercing someone by targeting a population for my study of people who don't fully understand what the risks are? Maybe I'm speaking, at a level that they don't fully comprehend. Or maybe I'm targeting children or maybe I'm targeting mentally ill individuals. We have to make sure that we're behaving justly and that not only can we justify every single thing that
we're doing, but that it's actually ethical and fair. And all of this is incredibly important because we have to make sure that everything we do within the field of aromatherapy continues to grow our field. And doesn't de-legitimize our field? We've experienced a lot of growing pains in aromatherapy just in the 15 years I've been involved as a professional. So much has happened. And I don't wanna see us going backwards in our eagerness to make sure that we build upon the scientific knowledge tha
t we have. We wanna make sure that we're doing everything correctly, that we're dotting our i's and crossing our T's and making sure that we get the information that we wanna get to grow the field, but that we do so legitimately and ethically. So again, review board approval is required for all research that involves human participants, even if we're not actually using the people themselves, even if we're only using information they fill out online. So this is not something that only applies to
me because I'm conducting clinical trials. It's something that applies to all of us here. We have to make sure that we're legally and ethically taking care of everyone who contributes to that research. And again, it's not just a bunch of red tape. We really want aromatherapy to continue to grow and be a respected field, and this is something that's required of it. So with all of that, how can you as an aromatherapist or an aromatherapy enthusiast get involved? There are a lot of ways that you ca
n get involved. So just because I'm discouraging you from throwing a survey out on SurveyMonkey tonight, and starting some research doesn't mean that I don't want to strongly encourage you to get involved in the research process. I hope to inspire all of you, every single person who's here to go out and look for different ways that you can get involved in aromatherapy. And one really good way to get involved in aromatherapy research, is to partner with researchers. Aromatherapist and researche
rs make excellent partners. there are a lot of things that you can accomplish, regardless of your, background in terms of, clinical background or research background or aromatherapy background. even if you're not a professional aromatherapist and you don't have any medical background at all, there are still a lot of action items that you can do. Number one, partner with researchers at a local university. You can volunteer for hands-on experience. at our research site, our research assistants c
reate all of the intervention tools that we ship the participants of our clinical trials. They get hands-on experience in the lab with all the blends that we're using for our clinical trials. And we have day after day after day full of activity thanks to all of these research assistants. In fact, we really wouldn't be able to accomplish very much in the field of research if we didn't have assistants who are coming in and working on this. There are a lot of things that you can do where you can ge
t involved hands-on with a research study or a clinical trial that don't require year after year of research training for all of our volunteers and all the people who wanna get involved, we provide hands-on training. and that experience for them. And I know that a lot of universities do a lot of research institutions do, and for people who wanna get even more involved, we have short classes that train our research assistants to take that certification from the National Institutes of Health. So i
f you're near us in Nashville, and by all means, feel free to give us a call, but you can also reach out really to any local university, any local researchers that you can find, they're usually very happy, to have anyone help to carry that workload. So there's a lot of ways you can get, more involved and, and some hands-on stuff. Action item number two, support the research process by sharing calls for participants with studies, in relevant groups, social media groups, Facebook groups on Pin
terest, through email, whatever that might be. Finding participants who are willing to complete a study according to the directions is one of the biggest hindrances to the growth of the body of knowledge on herbs and oils. So if you see calls for participants first, of course, make sure that they are IRB approved and that they're qualified to be conducting the research. Look for the primary investigator, the PI's qualifications, and then please share them. regardless of who is conducting the res
earch. Once you've checked it out, made sure it's legitimate, help those researchers get more participants. That's how we're gonna see more and more research published and more of those questions that have never been answered, answered when it comes to aromatherapy. Um, and then of course, protect the integrity of the research process by making sure that all of the things that you share meet those ethical standards. we definitely don't want aromatherapy to get a big black eye, for conducting ill
egitimate research or for putting people at risk. that's, that's something that's very difficult to recover from. Um, and we see that with, traditional medicine. When we go back to that Tuskegee experiment, nobody's recovered from the horrors that took place with that. And a lot of the other things that took place, even though for decades we've been working on fixing that, we still see that. So we don't want one of those black eyes when it comes to aromatherapy. We wanna make sure that what we
're doing, is legitimate and that it is ethical. And then I'm gonna conclude by giving you a few examples of some of the types of studies that we conduct here. And I know that there are researchers all over the world who are also conducting research studies on essential oils. Everything from looking at essential oils for, treatments for MRSA to looking at them as a sleep aid. what we're looking at here and all of this research is conducted by a multidisciplinary team. So we have PhD researcher
s, we have aromatherapist, certified aromatherapist and aromatherapy enthusiasts, interns, primary caregivers that we partner with, volunteers. Without that robust team of diverse individuals, none of this would ever be possible. So there's definitely a place for you in clinical research if this is something that you're passionate about and that you wanna see grow. There's a lot of things that you can do. Identifying and evaluating the articles that you find, interpreting them accurately, and of
course even getting involved in clinical trials yourself. And then just one quick kind of post note, if you do have any questions about that, how you can get involved yourself or, what any help interpreting studies. That's, a lot of people do that. I found this study. Does this mean what I think it means? There's my contact information and also a Facebook group that we have. It's just a small group on, um, using clinical trials in aromatherapy.
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