emotional rescue

Flower remedies can work wonders on the stressed and depressed

When Terry Badger split up with his wife a few years ago, he became depressed and started gaining weight. Like millions of other Americans, he turned to antidepressant drugs, but they didn't solve his problems. Then a friend recommended Bach flower remedies, which are designed to work on different negative emotional states or personality traits. Badger liked the idea of a natural approach and decided to give it a shot. He consulted Alicia Sirkin, a certified flower remedy practitioner, who analyzed his emotional state and prescribed a combination of essences to treat his negative feelings. "I could feel the positive effects right away," Badger says. Within a month, his emotions had leveled out and his depression had lifted.

A Walk in the Woods

In the 1930s, Edward Bach, M.D., a British bacteriologist and immunologist, noticed a correlation between his patients' emotional states and their physical ailments. He suspected that negative, or unbalanced, emotions could lead to physical illness--a theory now widely accepted by conventional and alternative practitioners alike. Convinced that there were substances in nature that would correct human emotional imbalances, Bach closed his practice to work on a new system of healing. On a morning walk through a dew-laden field he had a revelation: He sensed that each dew-drop would be imbued with the unique healing power of the plant it lay on. He experimented with different flowers, concocting formulas by floating flowers in glass bowls of pure spring water and leaving them in the sun to release their essences. Then, when he felt fear, anxiety or anger, he used his intuitive powers to determine which flower might help. The end result: 38 essences, made from completely nontoxic plants, which Bach felt corresponded with all the basic human emotions.

Put to the Test

What began as a homegrown therapy practiced by a handful of followers in England has become a common practice. Today flower essences are prescribed by more than 800 certified Bach flower remedy practitioners in 40 countries and used by countless millions. What's more, they're recommended by thousands of chiropractors, massage therapists, acupuncturists, dentists, psychotherapists, doctors and even veterinarians.

Like many alternative therapies, flower remedies have gained popularity based on people's personal experiences rather than hard scientific evidence. To date, only one double-blind, placebo-controlled study has evaluated the effects of flower remedies, and that was back in 1979. The experiment, conducted at the California Institute of Asian Studies, revealed that the participants receiving flower remedies showed a heightened feeling of well-being and self-acceptance compared with the control group, among whom no positive pattern could be detected--hardly a ringing endorsement of the therapy.

Since then, a handful of small-scale studies have found some positive results for the remedies. An Italian trial (published in La Medicina Biologica, 1997) found that a majority of patients suffering from anxiety, stress and depression showed improvement after being treated with flower remedies for four months. A pilot study at Heidelberg University Hospital in Germany found that pregnant women who were prescribed flower remedies gave natural birth more often and required significantly less medication during labor. Currently, several other research projects are under way, but it's surprising that they've been so long in coming. Popular herbal remedies like ginkgo biloba and St. John's Wort have been the focus of multiple studies in the past couple of years. But after 70 years of use, flower remedies haven't garnered much attention from the scientific world. But that hasn't stopped people from trying them.

Flower Cocktails

Like homeopathic formulas, flower remedies are extremely weak dilutions. After a flower's essence has been captured in heated spring water and combined fifty-fifty with brandy (to preserve it), the mixture is then combined again with water. At that point, no trace of the original flower is actually scientifically detectable in the resulting formula. As Nancy Buono, a Bach certified flower remedy practitioner in Tempe, Ariz., describes it, their effects are comparable to the way that listening to music acts on the psyche. "A symphony can cause a variety of emotions: It can be irritating, soothing or even uplifting. Flower remedies work on this same vibrational level."

J. Herbert Fill, M.D., a retired psychiatrist and former New York City Commissioner of Mental Health who often prescribed flower essences to his patients, has a different explanation. He believes that the essences act directly upon neurotransmitters--as do psychotropic drugs--to affect mood. "There are a lot of theories floating around," admits Alicia Sirkin. "But the one thing we know from clinical experience is that these remedies do restore a positive emotional state."