Since training as a Bach Foundation practitioner twenty years ago I have carried out several hundred client consultations, and though now officially retired I still sometimes make up remedies for friends. Presenting problems may involve emotional distress linked to difficult life circumstances or relationships, medical illness, bereavement, and/or longstanding personality traits. The therapy involves selecting a mixture, containing between one and six of the 38 flower essences, for each individual case. My experience has convinced me that if the mixture has been chosen and taken correctly it usually has beneficial effects. But is this due to a specific action of the remedies or to general factors such as expressing feelings during the interview, taking part in selecting the prescription, and positive expectations due to a mystique around the energy of flowers?
There are descriptive reports of Bach flowers being used with benefit in psychiatric and medical settings, general practices and hospices. Primarily given to balance the emotions, they can also help to alleviate physical symptoms in which anxiety is playing a part. However many orthodox clinicians – if they have heard of the remedies at all – dismiss them as rubbish because conventional science cannot explain how they could work.
It should be possible to evaluate Bach flower therapy with clinical trials in which subjects are randomised either to a treatment group receiving a genuine remedy mixture, or to a placebo group receiving mineral water. A number of such trials have been reported from around the world, outcomes being assessed with psychological and/or physiological measurement scales. I have joined a small group of practitioners who are reviewing published papers, and posting summaries and comments to a database which can be found at https://www.cambridge-bach.co.uk/bfr-clinical-trials/. Several of the studies reviewed so far indicate that Bach flowers have positive effects: for example reducing anxiety in children attending a dental clinic in India, reducing stress and insomnia for staff of a hospital in Spain, supporting the process of labour for women in a maternity unit in Brazil.
Some of the studies have limitations, for example:
- Giving the same combination of flowers to everyone in the treatment group. This may appear “scientific” and obviously saves time, but is not a fair test of the therapy because a standard formula would not be expected to work so well as an individual mixture chosen through interview with a trained practitioner.
- Lack of a proper randomised double blind placebo controlled design. It is essential that neither the subjects in the study nor the personnel carrying out the interviews know who is in the treatment group having real remedies, as opposed to the control group having mineral water.
- Presenting the results in statistical tables too complex for most people to understand – hardly in keeping with Dr Bach’s core value of Simplicity! It would be useful to include some description of subjective experience as well as the numerical data.
We will gradually be adding more studies to the database, and even if their methodology is not always perfect, taken together they may provide enough evidence to convince sceptics that Bach flowers do work. Being non-toxic and low-cost, these remedies could be valuable as a complementary therapy in almost any setting.
Jennifer Barraclough 