Do essential oils live up to their expected benefits? Where and when and how can these be used to truly obtain meaningful help?

They do have benefits up to a point. Their effects are meager and we have discussed this with you previously, focusing in particular on the anti-infective activity of some of the essential oils touted to have profound antimicrobial benefits and that this is true to some extent, but over-interpreted as being more powerful than is truly the case, the issue being one of concentration. There is a difference between putting essential oils within an isolated culture of microorganisms at high levels and the ability of the essential oils to penetrate a skin barrier in sufficient concentration to reach the interior of the body at sufficient levels to create the same benefit. So, this is one of the sources of confusion. There are others. There is a very strong association between the olfactory senses and many other manifestations of consciousness within the body. There are ways to use essential oils as a kind of neurolinguistic programming to associate the smell with a desired action and to use that to indirectly trigger a re-experiencing of forceful conscious will to make something happen or create a particular mood or block a certain negative impulse and so on— but that is using the repertoire of the senses in a creative way with the adjunct of particular stimuli represented by the oils as a simple tool for a kind of programming which can become habitual and have a benefit, but these are relatively weak interventions across the board. There are a few health benefits but these must be left to the discoverer and we cannot supply them unilaterally.