![]() The memos also contained a letter sent in 2007 to Alan Johnson, who was health secretary at the time. “He was very keen for his influence to be used nontransparently.” “Charles wrote lobbying letters to open space in the for ineffective medicine, which he tried to hide,” Marshall tells The Scientist. ![]() The release of the spider memos required a ruling by the UK Supreme Court, Michael Marshall, the project director of the Good Thinking Society, points out. These “black spider memos,” as they have become known, a collection of letters sent by then-Prince Charles to ministers in UK government departments, only came to light after a 10-year legal battle by The Guardian. The “most obvious” incident in which King Charles tried to influence the uptake of alternative medicine, says Ernst, were letters he sent to British politicians lobbying for the pseudoscientific treatments. ![]() Ernst says his critiques are not levied at the king’s personal use of homeopathy-though he notes that “as soon as he’s in any way seriously ill, he gets the best medicine that conventional treatments can offer.” Rather, it’s the now-king’s public support of homeopathy and other parts of alternative medicine-ranging from iridology to Gerson therapy (attempting to treat cancer with fruit juice and coffee instead of chemotherapy), marma therapy, pulse diagnosis, and reflexology (“those alternative treatments that lack evidence and plausibility,” as Ernst puts it)-that he and others criticize, particularly because of its potential to influence medical policies. However, Ernst says that, as far as he is aware, the queen never made any public statement supporting homeopathy or alternative medicine, and “that’s the big difference” compared with the king. The interest in alternative medicine was likely shared by King Charles’s parents, says David Colquhoun, a pharmacologist at University College London who has written about the king on his blog “ DC’s Improbable Science.” Colquhoun points to the queen herself previously being patron of the “Royal London Homeopathic Hospital,” now renamed as “Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine.” The hospital’s medical director, Peter Fisher, was Queen Elizabeth II’s homeopathic physician for at least 15 years. But “it turns out that isn’t really interested in research but wants to use-as much as possible-alternative medicine in the NHS nationally and in medicine globally,” Ernst says.įamously, then-Prince Charles said in 2010 that he “felt proud” of accusations that he is “the enemy of the Enlightenment,” a social movement in the 18th century during which science and evidence-based reasoning flourished. As King Charles ascends the throne, experts are reflecting on his influence on medical science in the UK as Prince of Wales, and how he might affect alternative medicine in the UK going forward as monarch.Įdzard Ernst, a retired academic physician who specialized in the study of complementary and alternative medicine at the University of Exeter and published his book Charles, The Alternative Prince at the beginning of this year, tells The Scientist that King Charles “takes a great interest in ,” which he originally thought was “brilliant” because such high-profile attention could have fostered support in Ernst’s own work researching which, if any, alternative treatments hold scientific merits. And the new king’s ties with alternative medicine go beyond this patronship and a dalliance with alternative medicine: In several instances, then-Prince Charles appears to have lobbied for homeopathy and other fields of alternative medicine. King Charles III has been conferred many new titles following the recent death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, but one existing title that remains is “Royal Patron of the Faculty of Homeopathy,” an organization of healthcare practitioners who also practice the pseudoscientific form of medicine. ![]() © SHUTTERSTOCK.COM, FREDERIC LEGRAND - COMEO ABOVE: Then-Prince Charles III speaking at COP 21, the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Paris. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |