Andrew Huberman· PhD
what they did is they had people use one of four different preparations say preparation one which includes some peppermint oil and some eucalyptus oil and all the details about the amount and the relative percentages are in the paper for you to peruse online through the link I mentioned before so they had four different groups they had one group apply peppermint oil but that peppermint oil also contained eucalyptus oil they had another group used just peppermint oil they had another group use just tiny traces of peppermint oil and smaller doses of eucalyptus oil and then they had a fourth group which was just using Placebo when I say using what they were doing is they were sponge applying the oil to the temples and forehead of people and then what they did is they used these different approaches to measure the activation of muscles to measure pain and they then induced head pain they induced headache so and they looked at the temporal muscles on the side they looked at forehead muscles things of that sort so they used three different types of pain stimuli they looked at people's sensitivity to experimentally induced Pain by either providing pressure so this was kind of a cuff around the forehead or thermal pain so they actually had them basically heat heat it up at the level of the skin and actually they brought the heat up pretty high to the point where people were rating the pain almost to the to the point of um excessive pain and pain limits so they obviously couldn't take them to the point of extreme pain and they had a constriction type condition in which they cut off blood circulation to the pericranial muscles using an inflatable collar around the cranium and they inflated that to pretty high pressure so kind of a brutal experiment to be involved in but look they're trying to mimic headache and I think by using these different approaches they're able to mimic the different aspects of headache and make sure and here's the key point that every person in the study is not just getting the same treatment for headache but is getting the same headache and that's something that I think gives this study power it's not the only way to do a study like this but it gives it a lot of power in trying to understand which types of interventions are going to assist in headache and maybe even specific dimensions of the pain and headache and basically what they found in the study is that of all the treatments they used the essential plant oil preparations that contained peppermint and I'll just mention as an aside and in other studies Menthol so these minty type uh essential minty type um what we think of as flavors but are really Aromas as well and as I'll point out the mechanism in a moment they have the effect of significantly reducing the intensity of the pain that is subjects could tolerate the pain far better and experienced less pain subjectively and the magnitude of the effects were really pretty impressive again I went into all this thinking essential oils okay that's like some really woo stuff um you know I don't know about that but it turns out that these essential oils at least the ones that contain peppermint oil with or without eucalyptus oil performed very well in reducing pain