Fatal mumbo-jumbo

The government is dealing in deceit when it allows public money to be wasted on alternative remedies

According to his supporters, our next sovereign and his first wife couldn’t have been a greater mismatch. Prince Charles was the upholder of the old values of restraint and sober thinking. He may have been buttoned-up, but his dullness was a sign of the sturdiness of his character. By contrast, Diana was a flibbertigibbet dazzled by bright lights and shifting fads. Wayne Sleep, Elton John … she was ready to try everything once, except incest and folk dancing.

It was undeniable that the late princess was a sucker for fashionable nonsense. Along with Cherie Blair and the ex-Duchess of York, she patronised Jack Temple, a ‘homeopathic dowser healer’, who claimed he helped ‘the lame to walk, the barren to conceive and the sad to smile’ by administering a brew distilled from strawberries grown in what he said was a Neolithic stone circle near Woking. A few days before her death, the Princess and Dodi Fayed visited Rita Rogers, a Chesterfield medium. Strangely, the soothsayer failed to warn of the dangers of being sped along the streets of Paris by a drunk driver.

But the failure of spiritualists to speak up when they could make a difference rarely bothers well-born clients. Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time is, in part, a chronicle of the willingness of the English aristocracy to fall for shamanism, mysticism, theosophy, quackery, faith healing, monkey glands and snake oil. The supposedly reasonable Prince Charles is no exception. I blame his parents. Prince Philip took out a subscription to Flying Saucer Review in the mid-1950s. With such an unpromising upbringing, the odds were that his son would turn out peculiar.

In a speech to a startled audience at the 150th anniversary dinner of the British Medical Association in 1982, Prince Charles declared that a good doctor ‘must have the feel and touch which makes it possible for him to be in sympathetic communication with the patient’s spirits’. Taken aback, the BMA published the results of an inquiry into ‘complementary’ medicine. It found that while some spiritualist treatments the prince recommended were merely useless, others, such as ‘herbalism’, could be positively harmful.

Last year, he was at it again, recommending that doctors should try Gerson cancer therapy, a costly and untested regime that involves coffee enemas and the downing of gallons of liquidised vegetables and fruit. His twitterings drew a magnificent reply from Michael Baum, professor emeritus of surgery at University College London.

‘The power of my authority comes with a knowledge built on 40 years of study and 25 years of active involvement in cancer research,’ he declared. ‘Your power and authority rest on an accident of birth. I don’t begrudge you that authority, but I do beg you to exercise your power with extreme caution when advising patients with life-threatening diseases to embrace unproven therapies. It is in the nature of your world to be surrounded by sycophants who constantly reinforce what they assume are your prejudices. Sir, they patronise you! Allow me this chastisement.’

It’s the nature of monarchy to ignore deserved rebukes. Last week, the Times said the prince had commissioned a report into the benefits of complementary therapies in an attempt to persuade the government to offer more of them on the NHS. As luck would have it, the Lancet later reported that homeopathic remedies did no good whatsoever. No one, not least the heir to the throne, had the right to be surprised. Scientists have been pointing out since the 18th century that a homeopath’s potions are the most expensive water in the world. (The pseudo-science rests on the fantasy that the more you dilute a drug, the more effective it is. A typical homeopathic remedy is one part alleged cure to 100 to the power of 30 parts of water. To all intents and purposes, it’s just water.)

None of the prince’s ravings would matter much if it wasn’t depressingly clear that the government will agree with him. Indeed, the NHS is already wasting public money by offering alternative remedies the Department of Health must surely know to be bogus. An information pack for primary-care groups on complementary medicine admits homeopathy is ‘less likely to be curative, but may be palliative’, but goes on to recommend its use anyway. The NHS guide for GPs says much the same.

In How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World [UK], his history of modern delusions, Francis Wheen tells how in 1999 the government recruited a feng-shui consultant, Renuka Wickramaratne, for advice on how to improve the inner cities. ‘Red and orange flowers would reduce crime,’ the sage informed the Civil Service, ‘and introducing a water feature would reduce poverty. I was brought up with this ancient knowledge.’

On the rare occasions the NHS is forced to defend pandering to ignorance, it says that large numbers of people believe in complementary medicine, which is true. It adds that an aromatherapist or dispenser of Bach’s flower remedies can at least offer patients the herbal tea and sympathy which busy GPs haven’t the time to deliver, which is also the case. We’re a democracy and the public likes to have its superstitions treated with respect; where’s the harm in giving the punters what they want?

The answer is that the government is dealing in deceit. It may be a harmless deceit most of the time, but it can be cruel and occasionally fatal deceit when the quacks are set loose on the seriously ill. A government which is prepared to deceive about medicine will deceive about much else besides.

• More columns by Nick Cohen

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