Her neck and shoulder pain made me think of a study I had read about. Lavender oil was added to accupressure treatments to see if pain was reduced in people with mild neck pain. This was not about people with specific pain. It sounds more like mild stress-type pain. with lavender oil over a 3 week period. One month after the end of treatment, compared to the control group, the manual acupressure group had 23% reduced pain intensity, 23% reduced neck stiffness, 39% reduced stress level, improved neck flexion, neck lateral flexion, and neck extension. However, improvements in functional disability level were found in both the manual acupressure group and the control group. I interpret that to mean that the acupressure caused improvement and the lavender oil increased the improvement. The study concluded, "CONCLUSIONS: Our results show that eight sessions of acupressure with aromatic lavender oil were an effective method for short-term neck pain relief." 2/13/11Complement Therapy Clinical Practice 2006 Feb;1 Epub 2005 Nov 8. An experimental study on the effectiveness of acupressure with aromatic lavender essential oil for sub-acute, non-specific neck pain in Hong Kong. Yip YB, Tse SH. School of Nursing, Faculty of Health and Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Hong Kong, PR China. hsvyip@inet.polyu.edu.hk
The abstract was titled, "To assess the efficacy of acupressure using an aromatic essential oil (lavender) as an add-on treatment for pain relief and enhancing physical functional activities among adults with sub-acute non-specific neck pain." The study took place during a course of 8 sessions of manual acupressure
