Tales of a Replicator

I’ve been taking the essence as instructed for 48 hours now. It cetainly hasn’t helped by apathy as claimed, but this may be more to do with spending 9 of the 10 days since I got back from holiday at work. I’m also becoming rather apathetic towards this trial; today I was supposed to receive my first phone call to check up on my progress but I’ve not heard a thing all day.

Oh well, off to bed, maybe they’ll perk me up in the morning and I’ll be raring to go…

Right, my bottle of Bach Flower Essences “Hornbeam” arrived from the trial today along with the usage instructions. Before starting to take the essence I must first register by calling an automated telephone line and entering my ‘participant ID number’. Unfortunately I managed to get through but it wouldn’t accept my ID number; I decided to take some essence anyway. Now, brace yourself, the instructions are very technical:

1. Take two drops of essence twice each day in a glass of water.

2 . Breakfast and supper are good times to remember.

3. If you have any problems during the study, please contact xxx xxx by email at xxx.xxx@plymouth.ac.uk.

I’ve already found another flaw in this study. I don’t drink water as often as I should, in fact I rarely drink anything that doesn’t contain caffeine or alcohol. Maybe any benefits I feel will be attributable to increased hydration rather than the essence itself.

Right, the first step in this trial was the signup, which involved a few pages of particularly tedious questionnaires. This is where I found the first flaw in the process, you’re not allowed to take part if you’ve used the product in the last 6 months; the only control being that you say you haven’t. Now, what stops someone attempting to sabotage the trial by signing up despite having used them recently? To be fair, this would only be counter-sobatage to what we are doing, so I can’t complain too much.

The majority of the questions asked centred around whether or not you were a “spirtual” person. Speaking as a scientist, whose understanding of energy comes from the laws of physics and not the Daily Mail health section, I’ve never really considered myself a spiritual person. Having answered several questions designed to determine whether I’m spiritual or not I come across the question that titles this post. I have a problem with this question, in itself it’s not ambiguous, but the answer can be misleading. I have to agree with the statement because I feel I have enough spirituality for my liking, i.e. none, but surely someone who is extremely spiritual could do the same; hopefully the person who designed the study will take this into account and not treat each question individually.

Anyway, I digress. The interesting thing about this study is that it seems to be trying determine if there is a link between the level of a persons spirituality and their opinion as to whether Bach Flower Essences work; to me this is a roundabout way of determining if the effect is psychosomatic and basically a placebo effect. If this is the case, why not do a randomised double blind placebo controlled trial and find out.

For now, I’m waiting for my bottle of hornbeam essence (for apathy etc etc etc according to the trial) to arrive. I’ll keep you posted, you never know I might be proven wrong and find that I suddenly have a whole new lust for life.

The other reason I started this blog was to enable me to give people an idea of what happens in the “medical” trial I’ve just signed up for. Bach flower essences are marketed as

“The original Bach Flower Essences is a system of 38 Flower Essences that corrects emotional imbalances: negative emotions are replaced with positive.”

you can buy some if you believe such such bollocks without any proof (note: I mean real proof, the plural of anecdote is not data)

Recently, the BBC advertised a trial for these “remedies” so I, as well as some of the others from the badscience forums, decided to sign up and see how the trial was conducted.