Study into Bach as a pre-anaesthetic medicine

Preoperative anxiety and tension can cause mental stress for patients who are about to undergo
an operation. This in turn can prevent the smooth introduction of anaesthesia. For this reason it is
very important to help pre-operative patients stay calm and free from anxiety. Drugs can be used,
but they don’t work well for everybody, and sometimes they cause an excessive reaction.
Bach remedies are mainly made from plants. They don’t have side effects and can be used safely.
Rescue™ Remedy, a combination of remedies, is said to alleviate various stresses, so I decided
to study its usefulness as pre-anaesthetic medication.
To do this I set up a randomised comparative test and double blind study using patients who were
undergoing surgery and either having general or spinal anaesthesia. Patients who had high blood
pressure, diabetes, cardiovascular disease or mental disorders were excluded. The research was
fully explained to the patients and forty of them who signed the written agreement were chosen
as volunteers. The ethical committee of the Tsudanuma Chuoh General Hospital approved the
research.
The volunteers were divided into two groups of twenty. Both groups received treatment bottles
that were prepared in the usual way, but while the treatment bottles of one group contained four
drops of Rescue™ Remedy, those of the control group only contained mineral water. Patients in
both groups were asked to take four drops of the remedies orally at any time prior to the day of
the operation, as frequently as they liked, and whenever they felt anxious and stressful; or if they
simply felt like taking remedies.
When evaluating the results we recorded the number of times that the person had taken the
remedy before entering the operating room. We measured blood pressure and heart rates when
the person arrived in the operating room. We used the Visual Analog Scale to measure levels of
anxiety and tension the day before the operation and after entering the operating room, and data
were reported using standard statistical methods for measuring average results, standard
deviation and so on.
One of the forty volunteers did not undergo the scheduled operation due to cancellation and three
others had not felt the need to take Rescue™ Remedy, so these four people were excluded from
the research. This left 36 people in the study. There was no significant difference statistically in
the 2 groups as to age, sex, height or weight.
We found no significant difference between the two groups as to blood pressure at systolic,
diastolic and mean blood pressure. No significant statistical difference was found in heart rates
either, although heart rate showed a tendency to decrease amongst subjects who took Rescue™
Remedy in comparison with the control group.
Other measures produced more interesting results. In particular, the frequency of intake of
Rescue™ Remedy decreased significantly in the group of subjects who had actually taken
Rescue™ Remedy when compared to the control group’s intake from the fake treatment bottle.
This last result seems to show that taking Rescue™ Remedy alleviated preoperative stress in the
test group. Subjects felt anxiety and tension less frequently, thus they took the remedy less
frequently. This confirms earlier research into pre-anaesthetic medication which showed that
patients felt a subjective alleviation of anxiety when taking medication, despite the fact that the
heart rate still increased at the time of entering the operating room.
These results indicate that Rescue™ Remedy can alleviate anxiety and tension prior to
operations, and that it should be considered to have potential as a pre-anaesthetic medication.
I would like to express my special thanks to Saodah Hayashi of Bach Holistic Kenkyukai who
kindly offered reference materials on Bach Flower Remedies. A Summary of this research was
reported at the 52nd conference of The Japanese Society of Anaesthesiologists (in Kobe, 2005)
and at the 4th Bach Conference (in Tokyo, 2005).