First, Mayo Connect will NOT "kick you off" for mentioning essential oils or any other valid, legal alternative medication or therapy, so no worries there. Essential oils have been around for a long time, and there are many well-documented uses for them, mainly on the outside of the body.

Next, here is a link to the full article:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10920374/
Here is my take after reading the article from beginning to end:

Eighty essential oils were considered and 12 essential oils that seemed to have an effect on M. Abscessus were tested on samples in a laboratory. Many were found to kill M. Abscessus within 1 - 7 days, far better than the antibiotics currently available. Remember TESTED ON CULTURE PLATES IN A LAB - not animals, not people, noy in the body.

Many of these essential oils pose extreme difficulty in delivery because they have toxic properties which make them not suitable for injestion or potentially damaging to tissue. In addition, no testing was done to determine if the beneficial properties survived delivery, via inhalation, injection or capsules. In their discussion they stated "Essential oils have significant cytotoxic properties that may affect their use in vivo (in the body)."

This report does not address the safety or usefulness of inhaling or nebulizing any of these essential oils - I hope with the information they got, more studies are being designed to do this.

The takeaway, at least for me, would be to do this VERY cautiously, a tiny bit of a single oil at a time, being sure to use pure products from reputable sources (not the vape shop or a reseller), dilute only with sterile water (not a carrier oil) and keep everything scrupulously clean. I would also run it by ALL of my docs beforehand, and check one of the interaction checker sites for any potential adverse reaction between any medication or supplement and any essential oil or herb.

It is too bad research is so costly - in NTM we have a rare infection, and M Abscessus is a very rare subset. So it is hard to get funding for the few when there are conditions like diabetes and heart disease that affect millions.

Please keep us and your doctors in the loop if you decide to try essential oils, and please be aware that your body may not like some of them, or their active ingredients, at all. Stop right away if you feel any adverse reactions like wheezing, shortness of breath, you don't want the cure to make you worse.