Spirituality (and possibly absorption) predicts outcome independently of expectancy following flower essence self-treatment

Hyland ME, Geraghty AWA

School of Psychology, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, PL4 8AA, UK

Objective

To determine the predictors of change in a natural observational study of flower essences and to test whether or not these predictors are consistent with conventional, placebo explanations.

Materials and methods

This is an open study where participants self-treat with Bach flower essences and complete questionnaires before treatment and record outcome after 1 month. Pretreatment measures included expectancy of the effect of flower essences, attitudes to CM, holistic health beliefs, absorption and spirituality. One month after the start of treatment participants responded to an e-mail enquiry about symptom change using a single 7-point change scale.

Results

One hundred and sixteen participants (97 university undergraduates and 19 staff) completed all assessments. Spirituality and absorption together predicted additional variance compared with a cluster of expectancy measures comprising expectancy, attitude to CM and holistic beliefs (P = 0.032), and spirituality alone (but not absorption alone) predicted more additional variance than the expectancy cluster (P = 0.014).

Conclusion

Our data are inconsistent with conventional explanations for the placebo effect. It is unclear what the mechanism is underlying these findings. They are consistent with an entanglement interpretation but other interpretations cannot be excluded at the moment.

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