Bach Foundation International Register
The Bach Centre
Mount Vernon
Bakers Lane
Sotwell
Oxon OX10 0PZ
England
www.bachcentre.com
Telephone +44 (0)1491 834678
Fax +44 (0)1491 825022
Study into Bach for hospital outpatients
BFRP Ann Hull has carried out an extremely successful audit into the effects of offering Bach remedies to hospital outpatients at an Oncology Unit.
She selected remedies for sixteen patients, following a personal consultation, and monitored and adjusted their use of the remedies over a 12 week period, with follow-up consultations and remedies at 3 week periods.
Ann used a standard tool called the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) to measure differences in anxiety and depression scores before and after the treatment period. Patients completed a HADS questionnaire prior to their first consultation and treatment and a second questionnaire at the end of their fourth consultation and treatment, when on average they had been taking the remedies for some 12 weeks.
The HADS results showed that the sample group experienced a positive response to treatment with the remedies. Their overall anxiety score fell from 80% before the first consultation to 21% at the end of the fourth – a decline in overall anxiety rates of 59%. The average depression scores fell even further, from 79% to just 13%.
Feedback from the patients themselves showed they were happy at the improvement in their emotional states. The improvement had in many instances avoided the need to take allopathic treatment with its associated side-effects. Indeed, the results were so good that they actually exceeded Ann’s own expectations.
Half of the patients receiving the remedies were only receiving palliative care for their illnesses, implying that their condition was considered to be not curable. As Ann says in her report, the value of the findings can only increase when we consider that this group of people may have been going through the most severe emotional crisis of their lives.
Clearly registered practitioners do not need to see the proofs of research before we reach for our remedies – we live those proofs every day that we work with clients. And no audit of this kind can be as reliable or valid as a clinical trial or a rigorous clinical audit. But studies like Ann’s do help to show sceptics that patients themselves feel they receive real benefits from treatment with the remedies and from the help of a BFRP. These findings further support our contention that treating patients in an orthodox environment with the remedies can be effective and safe, even alongside extremely complex and toxic allopathic treatments.
Your letters
We want you to use this Bulletin to keep in touch with each other. If anything wonderful, funny, interesting or just plain typical has happened to you in your work with the remedies, or if there are any questions that have been nagging away at you, or if you simply want to say hello, please write to us at the Bach Centre, marking your letter clearly as being ‘FOR PUBLICATION’.
We can’t promise to print every letter in the Bulletin, but even if we don’t use your contribution we always love to hear from you.
Six BFRP’s have just met for another weekend of working with the Flowers and supporting each other in our businesses.
First we broke up into pairs to partake in creative exercises working with clay, drawing, and the sand tray ( a counselling technique). It was a matter of being in the moment, allowing your inner voice and intuition to take over.
For myself I expressed Rock Rose in the drawing as that has been something I have had an opportunity to experience lately. With the clay I divulged in sacred geometry and shared with my creative partner how this mathematical form is in every living thing and process. Some call it the “breath of god” – which to me is the absolute essence of the flowers. I had never experienced doing a sand tray and once again I “spoke” philosophically, touching on the “medicine of the future” – how with all our medical knowledge and technology people still have broken hearts and souls. That was on one side of the tray and I then put a bridge where you could cross over to find a complete heart, a mirror to reflect your soul, a sun and a teardrop of glass to symbolise the flowers and a butterfly for transformation and beauty. We all found these exercises to be profound and touching on the subtleties in an unsuspecting way.
We had an interesting discussion on prescription and dosages and it is clear we all do this quite differently. Some of us prescribe “less is best” while others use the 6-7 remedies. As for dosages it depends on the acuteness of the clients situation but basically it comes back to Dr Bach’s words “take as often as needed but at least 4x day, especially first and last thing daily”.
Then followed a session on assessing the personalities of famous people, including Nelson Mandela, Princess Di, our prime minister in New Zealand, Michael Jackson and so on. Quite fun!
On the 2nd day we all wrote to the BFRP “panel” pretending we were a client wanting help. Most of us wrote about one of our cases for a bit of help. This type of discussion is very helpful as you get different perspectives and subtleties of the flowers showing.
As usual we all felt it to be an inspiring weekend constantly talking in Bach lingo. Next march we meet again in Tauranga – it will be the second NZ-wide weekend seminar. Do come and join us if any of you fancy a trip to beautiful New Zealand!
Arohanui
Di Stodart BFRP, New Zealand
Sounds like a genuinely inspiring weekend, Di! Our rule on mixing remedies is ‘as many as you need, no more, no less.’ This may mean seven remedies for one person, one for another, five for a third. And if somebody really needs eight (it does happen, very occasionally) then that’s what we give. – Ed.
I would have found the Quick Reference Guide useful when I visited Skyros, Greece, to teach the remedies. You will appreciate that a lot of resources are needed to teach, and I had to pick the most suitably useful with the weight restriction in mind. I limited myself to The Twelve Healers and a few other books, plus a pack of pictorial reference cards, so people could see each plant in colour – it would have been too difficult to get the wheel poster out to Greece. The quick reference guide could have saved even more weight by replacing the cards.
During the course I left my set of remedies in the sitting room to be freely available to whoever wanted to dip into the box. The guide could have been left with the box and would have been much easier for students to immediately select a remedy.
Angela Davies BFRP, England
I had a woman who came to see me because she had deep emotional and psychological problems. She hardly ever left her house, and she never saw her family. Her children had all grown up. Her life was a long history of incest, a violent husband, divorce, death of her son, etc. However, she had spent the last 4 years reading everything she could find on Bach. She had bought all the remedies and tried them all. She knew of various methods of preparing treatment bottles, she had read about how to cure physical ailments with the remedies and she knew all indications for use on a mental and a physical level by heart.
And she talked and talked.
She came to me because she felt she needed someone else’s advice now on which remedies to take. She had come a long way with the help of the remedies already and thought she would have been dead now if it wasn’t for Bach. So apparently she had now reached a point where she was ready to involve someone else, still only at a very superficial level though.
Having read all available books (and more) on Bach and talking like a waterfall, she quite overwhelmed me. I didn’t know what to say and which remedies to suggest. My head went blank and I couldn’t think. It would have been ideal to have a Quick Reference Guide in front of me. It would be seen as a professional tool to show to clients and not a home-made list to remember remedies from.
Lise Matthews BFRP, Wales
I am often asked to volunteer my services at health and healing events that are trying to raise funds for different charities. The requirement is normally to offer 20 minute treatments, so as to raise as much money as possible. Using reflexology, healing, head massage and so on I can give an adequate and effective treatment in this time.
Earlier this year, however, I agreed to offer Bach consultations at one evening. I felt greatly daunted at the prospect – was it possible to achieve an effective consultation in the time available? In the end I managed to see seven clients in two and a half hours. Exhausting work, but extremely fulfilling and challenging. The drawback was the lack of time to explain to the clients their chosen remedies. The new Quick Reference Guide would have been such a helpful and invaluable tool for this purpose, to help to present a clear picture and concise information on the effect of the remedies.
I have been invited to take part in another therapy event at the general hospital for my area in mid-November. It will be a very large and well-attended occasion. I have been specifically asked to promote the remedies and to again offer 20 minute consultations. It would be so helpful to have a copy of the guide to enable me to get as much information to each client as possible.
Margaret Woodward BFRP, England
Congratulations to Margaret, Angela and Lise, who each win a free copy of the Quick Reference Guide. Our thanks also to the many other practitioners who responded. We’re only sorry not to have more to give away! – Ed.
In reply to Anne O’Donnell’s letter (September Bulletin. – Ed.), we as BFRPs have been given a Code of Practice to follow, which protects us, our clients and Dr Bach’s work. As we have been taught not to diagnose using machines, by dowsing or related methods, I feel it would be safer for all concerned if Anne refers her colleague’s clients on to somebody else to make up the remedies. That way her professional integrity will not be compromised.
Pamela McBride, BFRP, England
Getting on…
The former BIEP co-ordinator in Japan, Hermia Brockway, isn’t letting the grass grow under her feet now that she has retired. She is planning… well, we’ll let her tell you all about it:
“Getting On is a publication combined with a web site, an online and offline community for the over- 60’s. It aims to be a reference point for advice and help and a discussion forum in which older people can share their experience and knowledge; and get to know what others in the same age range are doing, and make friends internationally as well as locally. It will act as a do-it-yourself ‘consumer advice’ bureau, with older people themselves explaining ideas, methods, treatments or products that worked well for them. At the start, most of the advice and information will be compiled by me from expert sources until we get enough feedback etc. going. Also I will be compiling a database of complementary health advisers and practitioners as a long term resource for GO members.
“Since Bach is essential for good health care, the first year some Getting On issues will also carry an extra 12 pages devoted to Bach, with case studies, Q & A, quotes from international publications and forums and so on – all designed I hope to appeal to you and your elderly relatives and acquaintances. This special introductory offer to readers of the Bulletin means that the six issues with additional Bach information will go to you. Hopefully it will help our Bach work, and this is a way of introducing GO internationally.
“In order to get started and if you are willing to help, please write. I will send you six free first issues of the newsletter to circulate to any over 60’s people of your acquaintance, together with the subscription leaflets (subscriptions are 20 British pounds. or 15 if text is downloaded). And if you are a practitioner of another therapy apart from Bach, you can have an advertisement offering those services, in the newsletter / online, all free for one full year.”
Welcome to…
Since the last (September 2003) issue was prepared, 61 new practitioners have joined the register:
- in Argentina, Rosa Maria Stockhammer;
- in Brazil, Antônio Bortoluz, Perola de Carlos Matteo Haydu, Lucia Aparecida Michaelis, Janise Da Ponte Souza and Maria Aline Krüger Fürstenberger;
- in Denmark, Helle Kjaer Hansen and Lene Strøm Dalsgaard;
- in England, Yvonne Hough, Joan Burton, Kathy George, Frances Donaldson, Christine Davison, Joan Inglis, Sue Gelder, Tracy Jefferies, Theresa Hannon, Gregory Ford, Mandy Gallagher, Estelle Blackman, Sue Smalley, Lara Stuart-Burgess, Kira Carpenter and Gloria Cook;
- in France, Sylviane Acosta, Martine Veyrac, Kitty Hegie Dominicus, Marie-Odile Poiron, Cayre Stéphan, Hélène Aublayd and Sylvette Hocquard;
- in Germany, Bettina Wirth;
- in Ireland, Joan O’Reilly;
- in Italy, Stefania Orsini;
- in Japan, Fumiko Sogabe, Yasuko Katsumata, Chiho Yoshida, Hiromi Kin, Kiyomi Satoh, Akiko Komano, Tomoko Kawashima and Yuri Dehn;
- in Scotland, Sheila Llewellyn;
- in Spain, Joana Cervera Catala, Maria Eulalia Papiol Vila, Ana Isabel Henriques Delgado Salta, Maria Amalia Correa Liró, Jose Gamez Molina, Elisa López Nieto, Mercedes Navacerrada Crespo and Toni Olives Vidal;
- in the U.S.A., Jonalea Neider, Patty Bover, Sue Kenny, Cheryl Nashbar, Janet Reilly, Julie Briggs, Lori Verier, Lisa Opfermann and Sher Horosko
- and in Wales, Rebecca Griffiths.;
There are now 1,419 practitioners on the register.
This archive material has been edited to remove some out-of-date advice and information.