by Marielena Nunez BFRP
With a Bach journey spanning four decades, I’ve worn many hats – user, trainer, distributor, assessor, marker, and consultant. And one question has been asked over and over: how is the efficacy of these remedies tested?
When I was a Bach flower remedies distributor in Venezuela, the Ministry of Health demanded tests and research. Similar requests poured in from other Latin American countries. Students and other curious people continue to ask me about testing and research.
Having taught research methodology for many years in different universities and having had the opportunity to study with a renowned doctor in psychology, who once mentioned in one of his classes the tendency of people to try to measure emotions as if they were quantifiable, I’ve come up with some reflections that I’d like to share with you. I am not claiming they are the source of truth. Still, they could be considered when explaining to interested people some of the reasons why results are hard to obtain when trying to perform tests on the Bach flower remedies. I will not get get involved in technical explanations. Instead I will try to make it as simple as possible. Here are my two cents.
Emotions are intricate and personal, and each person experiences them in a unique way. They can’t be isolated, as they manifest in various forms and can be influenced by a multitude of factors. Consider impatience – one person may feel it as a mood, while for another, it is a personality trait. Both can take Impatiens as a remedy, but their impatience is expressed in combination with different emotions.
This diversity of emotional experiences makes it challenging to apply a ‘one size fits all ‘approach to testing Bach flower remedies. We treat the person, not the disease, as Dr. Bach said.
Traditional research methods, such as control, experimental, and blinded studies, may not be suitable for capturing the complexity of individual emotional responses. This is because, as mentioned above, you and I may be experiencing the same emotion, but our context is entirely different. How can we isolate an emotion as a variable if it is experienced differently by different people?
This limitation of traditional research methods underscores the need for more flexible and individual-centric approaches, such as longitudinal studies, to understand the efficacy of Bach flower remedies. Longitudinal studies allow us to track the individual’s evolution over time, and to consider individual variations in the emotional experience. They match perfectly with the retrospective quality of the Bach flower remedies. They talk about the individual’s progress, self-awareness, and self-discovery.
Additionally, it is essential to consider that the effects of Bach flower remedies may be subtle and multifaceted, depending on how acute the emotions are at the moment of the research (emotional onion layer), and may not be easily measurable through traditional research methods. Even though the sample to be tested may experience a particular emotion, it might be in different degrees of acuteness and associated with a myriad of additional emotions for each individual of the target sample. More holistic and qualitative approaches may be needed to adequately assess the impact of a Bach flower treatment, considering changes in specific emotions, overall quality of life, general well-being, and the coping strategies used by the person.
The same applies when conventional methods are used to test the efficacy or understand the composition of Bach flower remedies. Subjecting these remedies to standardized tests may be limiting. It may not fully reflect their complexity and functioning in our bodies.
Traditional chemical analysis cannot provide information about the components/traces of the Bach flower remedies; they may not capture their subtle nature. Formal analysis measures what labs and classical researchers have been measuring for ages, and the Bach flower remedies don’t work on the body’s chemical responses as an antibiotic, analgesic or antidepressant works. When a regular medication is tested, some of the tests among many that are performed are pharmacokinetics, which refers to how the body absorbs, distributes, metabolizes, and excretes the product; pharmacodynamics, which refers to how the medication interacts with the body pathways to produce its effects, and bioavailability that refers to the fraction of medication effects through the most effective delivery mode. These are methods commonly used for testing conventional medications.
But the Bach flower remedies are not conventional medicine, and for this reason there is a need to consider a variety of research approaches and to keep an open mind to less traditional methods. Among the less traditional methods some have tried, we might mention thin layer chromatography, and the use of colour plate and Kirlian photography.
In conclusion, we might have had lots of investigations of the remedies undertake when good intentions, but often we have been measuring with the wrong measuring tape and are not measuring the same things (we thought were comparing apples to apples, but it turned out to be apples and oranges). As Albert Einstein is reputed to have said, insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.
We need to remember the principle of simplicity. The focus is not on how the Bach flower remedies work but on how we feel when they do their work and we feel the effects. That is the key.