What happens when you cannot replicate a whole oil with its isolated parts.
In what is believed to be the first study of its kind, researchers at Roseman University College of Pharmacy independently purchased doTERRA essential oils and began testing them — without doTERRA's knowledge or involvement.
Drs. Tim Le and Jeffrey Talbot led an interdisciplinary team that tested doTERRA oils across multiple research models. They observed what they came to call “The Oil Effect”: each oil tested had quantifiable and reproducible biological activity.
But the most significant finding was this: when researchers isolated individual components and tried to replicate the effects, they could not. The whole oil produced effects that no single constituent could reproduce — even when the constituent was present in the same concentration.
“We found that each of the doTERRA oils had quantifiable and reproducible biological activity. To our surprise, we could not replicate the biological effects by breaking down the oil and administering its purified constituents. In a sense, we tried to synthetically build identical essential oils, with no success.”
— Dr. Jeffrey Talbot, Roseman University College of Pharmacy
This finding has profound implications for how we think about essential oils. It suggests that the therapeutic character of an oil is a property of the whole — the specific ratios, the hundreds of minor compounds, the synergy between constituents.
This is why adulterated oils or synthetic replicas fail to behave like the real thing. And it is why purity matters: a diluted or altered oil is not just weaker — it is fundamentally different.
doTERRA subsequently awarded $128,000 in grant funding to advance Roseman University's research. Further testing using nanofluidic proteomics confirmed that doTERRA oils potently induced therapeutically relevant signalling pathways — and that oils from competitors had minimal effects.