Last April, I predicted that Prince Charles quackery promoting charity, the Foundation for Integrated Health faced imminent closure due to non submission of accounts to the Charity Commission.

Ten days later, the Foundation announced its intention to close amid arrests for fraud and money laundering. In a statement, the charity claimed that it had always intended to close as its aims had been met. This claim was met with derision: a “ludicrous bit of make-believe”, said David Colquhoun.

Well, finally the accounts for 2008 have been submitted. The Charity commission usually publishes the accounts of charities, but for some reason they are not available online. So, I asked for a copy and quickly received them. [pdf]

What do they reveal?

Firstly, a spate of trustees resigned around March 2009.

Why, we do not know. But it would have been about this  time that difficulties in making the accounts balance would have started to come to light.

As far as the headline numbers went for 2008, they were not great:

And, as we had been hearing reported, the auditors had experienced problems.

It would appear that the cash problems had placed the charity in a little difficulty.

So, ‘Long Term Supporters’ had bailed them out. I wonder if that is euphemism for Brian? Of course, other supporters that have stepped in to save Foundation projects have included Dame Shirley Porter.

The accounts have been submitted without the trustees or auditors being able to satisfy themselves that they are complete and accurate.

The accounts again make the claim that a review had been undertaken and a decision made to close the charity.

On one point, Gimpyblog reported that Boo Armstrong, the person behind the infamous Northern Ireland CAM study had been appointed Chief Executive. It is a claim she still makes on her LinkedIn profile.

But the idea that a decision had been made some time ago to close the charity does not appear to be credible to me. No hint of it is given in the previous year’s accounts that this might be on the cards and the behaviour of the charity has suggested it was business as usual, right up to the last minute.

There was to be a large conference in July featuring ‘keynote speakers’ Roger Daltry and Dr Phil Hammond. Dean Ornish, the champion of ‘integration’, was to come over from the US.  The conference was to “put integration on the national map, the easier it will be for each of us to get the necessary funding and support to take integration forward in the future.” Hardly, the wish of an organisation near the completion of its goals. Teh conference has now been cancelled.

Officers of the charity would appear to also have been exploring links with Indian institutions. The Times of India reported in February that, “The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health will soon collaborate with institutes practising and promoting alternative and integrated systems of medicine.” Kim Jobst and Michael Dixon were interviewed in India and indicated just how much work still needed to be done in the UK, “Integrated health is not covered under the National Health Service and funding is less than 1%. Due to allopathy doctors and the pharma lobby, research in integrated medicine is suppressed and has suffered because of low funding”.

A more realistic picture is that the Foundation was failing miserably. It was suffering internal collapse and its initiatives were being heavily criticised and thwarted. The chance to start a Faculty of Integrated Medicine at The University of Buckingham ended once the Vice Chancellor found out what the game was. Its lobbying to have herbalists and acupuncturists statutorily regulated appeared to have collapsed after fierce opposition to the aggrandisement of quacks was forthcoming. The voluntary regulation of other forms of quackery through the Foundation supported body Ofquack was feeble and ineffective.

It looks like the Foundation was struggling on though a meltdown before the arrests finally made the remaining trustees pull the plug. Whilst we cannot know for sure, the statements in the accounts look a little like a post hoc justification for closure rather than an accurate representation of history.

What role Prince Charles had in the closure is again almost certainly never going to be known. He cannot have been happy with his toad eaters leaping from one crisis to another and must have seen the charity as nothing but bad publicity for his future kingshipness. A complaint had been made to the Charity commission about how the Prince may have used the charity to attack critics of alternative medicine. I am sure he would have been keen to avoid an investigation.

But it is good news that it has gone. There is nothing wrong in principle with organisations promoting various forms of alternative health care, but the constitutional position of Prince Charles gave far more weight to these fringe views than they deserved. And his position made it almost impossible to allow full scrutiny of their activities due to his exemptions and privileges as heir to the throne.

I hope the Prince now wisely chooses to keep his views on magic beans to himself. And if he wants to take magic sugar pills away with him on his journeys, it should be nobody else’s business but his own. The rest of us want to have a grown up debate about healthcare and evidence. Charles has shown that he does not have the insight to take part constructively in that discussion.

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If you have some skilz in reading accounts [pdf] let me know what you think. There is plenty of scope for me to have missed the obvious and non-obvious.

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An Accountant’s View

An accountant reader of this blog, who wishes to remain anonymous, has written the following after looking at the accounts.

You mention the financial position briefly, but it’s very poor indeed. Their income fell by more than half and they made a huge loss.

The fraud doesn’t account for it. They disclose as extraordinary cost of only 148k, which isn’t anywhere near the in year deficit (circa 430k) and while the auditors can’t guarantee this is the full extent of the fraud, if it is any larger, it would simply make the position worse.

So, it must be to do with normal operations. The full year of activity that they outlined in the 2007 accounts suggests they didn’t plan for such a financial position. This is backed up by their statement that they only decided to wind up after a review in 2008 and 2009. So it wasn’t as if they ran up a deficit because they were using up funds in advance of closing.

So the question for the Trustees is: Were they concerned about the worsening financial position during 2008, and did they do anything to investigate it? It is impossible to tell, but had they investigated why finances had worsened, the fraud might have come to light earlier.

I notice that their auditors are based in the same building as FIH, so, it’s not as if they had a long way to walk if they wanted a bit of informal advice or ask someone to come in and take a look!

There are a couple of things hidden in the numbers as well, which might be of interest.

The only restricted income that they get is from the DoH, and the payments received for Regulation of complementary therapies fell significantly from 300k in 2007 to 120k in 2008. You may well know why this happened, but I couldn’t find anything in the accounts to explain it, nor in your posts.

Also, did you clock the Related Party transaction? Nelsons (of whom the trustee Robert Wilson is Chairman) increased their donations from 44k in 2007 to 150k in 2008. 150k represents well about 35% of the FIH’s unrestricted (ie non-DoH income) during the year. FIH’s dependence on Nelsons increased massively – it went from around 4% of thier total income in 2007 to around 27% in 2008.

The donation is virtually the same as the amount disclosed in relation to the fraud (150k compared to 148k). There is no suggestion whatsoever that they are related since the fraud didn’t come to light until 2009, but they were both in the same year. I wonder how pleased Nelsons would be if it were publicly known that their financial support has effectively bankrolled a fraud at FIH?

Also, interestingly, Robert Wilson did NOT resign in March 2009, but waited until December to do so. It’s hard to judge what this means, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see further significant donations from Nelsons in the 2009 accounts, whenever they appear. I wonder if these are the ‘Long Term Supporters’ they refer to?

It looks like the Endowment will revert back to its donor (which I presume is Prince Charles, but it might not be since they remain anonymous in the accounts). This makes up most of the charity’s current assets (Investments+some cash) but they won’t be able to use these funds to wind the charity up since they have to pay it back. At the end of 2008, they owed £255k but only had around £100k available to pay it off.

Add on the costs of closing the charity down which can be significant (redundancies, etc) and any deficit in 2009 and they will need to lean on their “Long Term Supporters” if they are shut down in an orderly fashion (and avoid insolvency). And it could be very messy, since the auditors have said that they can’t guarantee the numbers aren’t materially misstated due to the fraud and lack of paperwork.

Related posts:

1. Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health Closes As predicted last week, Prince Charles Charity has closed amid claims of fraud, money laundering and misuse of charity status. Their statement reads. 30 April 2010 The Trustees of The...
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Their statement reads.

30 April 2010

The Trustees of The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health have decided to close the charity. Whilst the closure has been planned for many months and is part of an agreed strategy, the Trustees have brought forward the closure timetable as a result of a fraud investigation at the charity.

The Trustees feel that The Foundation has achieved its key objective of promoting the use of integrated health. Since The Foundation was set up in 1993, integrated health has become part of the mainstream healthcare agenda, with over half a million patients using complementary therapies each year, alongside conventional medicine.

From 2000-2007, at the request of the Department of Health, The Foundation ran a regulation programme which resulted in the creation, in 2008, of an independent self-regulatory body for complementary therapy, called the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council.

On 1st April 2010, the Secretary of State for Health announced plans to introduce statutory regulation for herbalists and to consider the equivalent for acupuncture.

The Trustees believe that the best way of promoting integrated healthcare in the future is through the networks of specialist practitioners which the charity has helped to establish.

These networks have brought together specialists and proponents of integrated healthcare, such as doctors, nurses, clinicians, consultants, scientists and students.

It is laughable that they claim their “key objective of promoting the use of integrated health” has succeeded. Their initiatives to create new regulatory bodies for quackery, University courses in nonsense and increased use of magic medicine in the NHS have all failed.

The fact that the charity were planning a big conference in July would suggest that this has not indeed been planned for ‘many months’. Recent arrests and the inability for the charity to submit accounts to the Charity Commissioner would suggest a more forced closure. It is inconceivable that Prince Charles would abandon his support for homeopathy if his hand was not being forced.

The concept of Integrated Medicine is a trojan horse. Strip away the cosy rhetoric of caring for the “whole person” and what you find is a payload of quackery, pseudo-medicine and anti-scientific nonsense. The FIH has been notorious for promoting absurd treatments including homeopathy, reiki and acupuncture despite the evidence overwhelming suggesting these are useless treatments.

As such, the FIH has been a menace to the public understanding of science and its role in healthcare. It will not be missed by all those who care about science, reason and good health.

It is also a little delicious irony that they issued a rather spiteful news item last month suggesting that “Professor Ernst damaged by FIH”. This follows the news that Ernst’s rather wonderful research group in Exeter is struggling to find funds. The Exeter group was one of the few non partisan research centres in the world that provided unbiased and quality reviews of alternative medicine. As such, he was hated by the proponents of pseudo-medicine, such as Charles and FIH. And now, Ernst has outlived his supposed nemesis.

See Also

The end of the Prince’s Foundation for Magic Medicine

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What is a Toad Eater?

from Michael Quinion:

We have to go back to British market and fairground quack doctors of the seventeenth century and earlier for the origin of this one. It was common for such men to have an assistant to do the dirty work, often somebody young or half-witted or otherwise under the boss’s thumb. As part of their sales pitch, such fake medical men sometimes made their assistants eat (or more usually, pretend to eat) a toad.

The common European toad was commonly regarded as poisonous, as the warty glands on its skin secrete a rather nasty milky fluid when the animal is threatened (friends who are into natural history report they’ve handled toads many times and never had any trouble, but then they’ve not actually tried eating one alive; I’m told a dead one isn’t poisonous, provided you strip the skin off first, but the experiment is not to be recommended). The quack doctor would use his nostrums to make an apparently miraculous cure on his assistant and so enhance his reputation and his sales.

As a result, toad-eater came to be a nickname for a servile assistant to a showman. By the following century it had generalised into a term for any fawning flatterer or sycophant, and by the nineteenth century was often shortened to toady.

Related posts:

1. The Curious Last Quack of the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health Last April, I predicted that Prince Charles quackery promoting charity, the Foundation for Integrated Health faced imminent closure due to non submission of accounts to the Charity Commission. Ten...
2. Police Investigate The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health Scotland Yard has been called into Prince Charles’ charity, the Foundation for Integrated Health, to investigate alleged fraudulent transactions. Reports suggest that either £150,000 or £300,000 has gone missing...
3. Prince of Wales Charity Faces Imminent Closure The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health has just a few more days to submit its accounts for 2008 before it risks the near certainty of delisting as a charity....

The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health has just a few more days to submit its accounts for 2008 before it risks the near certainty of delisting as a charity.

According to the Charity Commission web site, the accounts are now 171 days overdue. Charities have ten months to submit their Annual Return. After this time, they are given warnings and reminders for four months. Failing submission after this grace period, they are given an extra two months with a warning that they will be removed from the register if accounts are not received. It is now just a few days short of that final deadline.

I reported the reason for the delay recently. Scotland Yard have been called into the Prince’s charity as the auditors have been unable to sign off the accounts due to ‘transactional irregularities’. The police are now investigating a possible fraud. At present, there are no details of what has gone on, but it looks likely now that the problem will be terminal for the charity. In addition, a complaint has been made to the Charitiy Commission regarding the involvement of the Prince of Wales in its day to day activities. There are concerns that the Prince has been using the charity as his personal tool for lobying for his views on alternative medicine. That would be against charity rules.

The Charity commission allow charities to continue to operate under exceptional circumstances “under the direct supervision of a case officer” if there are “no continuing risks to donors or beneficiaries”.  It is not clear if that condition can be applied.

I have also recently uncovered how Dame Shirley Porter, the disgraced former head of Westminster Council and Tesco heir,  has been giving money to Charles to fund his lobbying and has also been regularly donating sizable sums to the Foundation from her own charity pot.

This closure will be a humiliation and bitter blow for the Prince of Wales. His involvement in quackery has brought much criticism as he appears to directly wish to influence the political direction of the NHS by including nonsensical and disproven quack treatments into public healthcare. The closure of the charity will also be a great blow for all alternative therapists in the UK as it has been one of the most powerful voices for the promotion of quackery. It has had the ear of the Department of Health. Its demise will hopefully allow more rational voices to be heard.

And that can only be to the benefit of public health. At present, the charity is a menace.  It talks the insidious language of ‘integrated healthcare’ and ‘finding innovative ways to bring people back to health.’ Beneath the rhetoric, is its unscientific promotion of magical thinking, charlatanism and quackery. It is a major diversion from the necessary public debate about how a finite health service provides the best treatments. By systematically undermining the concepts of best evidence and scientific thinking in healthcare, it helps ensure very large problems, such as the provision of expensive and poorly evidenced cancer care drugs, are muddied by fluffy thinking about ‘health freedom’ and ‘personal choice’.

The Quackometer looks forward to its imminent demise. I am not sure what I will blog about when it is gone.

Postscript

The excellent gimpyblog discusses some potential problems with the Foundation’s accounts here.

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Scotland Yard has been called into Prince Charles’ charity, the Foundation for Integrated Health, to investigate alleged fraudulent transactions. Reports suggest that either £150,000 or £300,000 has gone missing from the charity and that the accounts could not be signed off by auditors because of transactional discrepancies. The charity has already received fines for late submission of accounts. Failure to file is a criminal offense.

This comes just a few weeks after it was revealed that a complaint had been submitted to the Charities Commission about the Prince’s direct involvement in the charity to promote his own political agenda.

The charity has been funded from Price Charles’ own business interests, particularly Duchy Originals. However, his organic food company has not made a profit in a while and had to enter into an exclusive deal with Waitrose in order to stay alive.

Details of the alleged fraud are of course sketchy at present. Undoubtedly, we will find out as the police investigation progresses. What we do know more about is the Charity Commission complaint regarding Charles’ undue influence in the working of the Foundation.

It is without doubt that the Foundation for Integrated Health follows the Prince’s fondness for pushing pseudo-medical treatments into the NHS. It uncritically supports nonsense therapies, such as homeopathy, and lobbies for their inclusion in public health provision. The complaint to the commission was made because it was strongly suspected that it was acting at the Prince’s behest rather than in the public interest. The matter came to a head recently after a dispute between Professor Edzard Ernst, Professor of Complementary Medicine, and Dr Michael Dixon, medical director at the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health. Dixon claimed in Pulse magazine that Ernst was a ‘leading member of science’s militant tendency’ and that he “ is not interested in whether the patient gets better”. It was a vitriolic attack.

The FIH has long disliked Ernst after he leaked an early copy of the Smallwood report that was promoting the expansion of alternative medicine within the NHS. The former chair of the Foundation, Sir Michael Peat, complained to Ernst’s employers, the University of Exeter, that he had broken a confidence. Ernst was cleared of misconduct by the University but complains that this episode tarred his reputation there and that his chair is now at threat. He was also on the wrong end of a very damning letter by Sir Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet.

Horton wrote a very condemning letter to the Times. Whilst stating that “complementary medicine is largely a pernicious influence on contemporary medicine, preying, as it does, on the fears and uncertainties of the sick”, he said of Ernst’s behaviour,

Professor Ernst seems to have broken every professional code of scientific behaviour by disclosing correspondence referring to a document that is in the process of being reviewed and revised prior to publication. This breach of confidence is to be deplored.

Peer review of draft findings by experts is a vital part of the scientific process. But it can only function effectively if draft reports are allowed to be circulated, commented upon and corrected within an environment of trust and confidence before their public release.

If that system breaks down, as it has done in this case, freedom of thought and unreserved critical scrutiny of that thought will be eroded for fear of public reaction to controversial opinions.

But Horton was wrong on two counts.

Firstly, this was not a peer reviewed publication. The report was not commissioned by the Foundation for Integrated Health, but directly by the Prince of Wales himself. It says so in its introduction. However, it would appear that originally the report’s investigators were commissioned by the Foundation. A switch occurred at some point as to who was actually commissioning the report. The aims of the Prince and the Foundation appear to be interchangeable. What became clear is that when a spokesperson said that the Prince was not involved with the complaint against Ernst, that this was misleading. Pulse reports that Clarence House said,

a complaint had been lodged with the university by the Prince’s private secretary Sir Michael Peat, but said this was in his capacity as chair of the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health and the Prince of Wales did not know of the letter.

In addition, the Foundation have also recently asserted that Peat was acting on their behalf. However, Ernst reports that the complaint letter from Peat began, “I am writing both as the Prince of Wales’ Principal Private Secretary and as Acting Chairman of His Royal Highness’ Foundation for Integrated Health.” Clearly, the Prince and his charity appear to be as one and synonymous when expressing views about alternative medicine.

But, importantly, the report was not being ‘peer reviewed’. Ernst was asked to take part in a review of the evidence of CAM for inclusion in the report. However, at some point, the need to consider evidence was dropped and the report was to become simply some case studies and that “Mr Smallwood’s plan was to submit it to UK health ministers in the hope to change health policy in Britain.” The report had ceased to be in any way scientific and was now becoming overtly political in its remit. Ernst was not breaking any bond of scientific peer trust during review.

Secondly, Horton himself has some strong views about when it is acceptable to break trust which would appear to be at odds with his condemnation of Ernst. When Sunday Times reporter Brian Deer uncovered the degree to which Andrew Wakefield had been hiding massive conflicts of interest over his paper into the links between MMR and autism, Deer and the MP Evan Harris took their findings to Richard Horton in advance of publication. Horton had originally published the Wakefield paper and the Sunday Times thought it important to get his reaction. However, after the meeting and before the Sunday Times broke the story, Horton went public with a press conference on the Friday with the ‘explosive allegations’. Brian Deer believed he had an agreement with Horton, but the Lancet editor felt that ‘the allegations were so grave that he could not allow publication to go ahead without making a pre-emptive attempt to correct the errors.’

Clearly, there are times for Horton when it might be acceptable to go public against an agreement.

In this light, Ernst is not a breaker of confidences but a whistleblower.  The Prince was trying to directly influence government policy with a report that was one-sided, misleading and was deliberately ignoring the scientific evidence supplied by Ernst and others. Given the Prince’s unique constitutional position, this is a very unsatisfactory position. Ernst states his reasons for releasing the report were that the Prince was overstepping his constitutional role.

[Correction and Update: It would appear that Ernst did not leak the Smallwood Report but commented on it to a journalist who already had obtained a copy. Ernst explains in a comment below that he felt compelled to comment as the report would 'put lives at risk'. It would also look like the Horton letter was used as the justification for the Peat complaint to the University of Exeter.]

No matter what the result of the fraud investigation or what the Charity Commission decide, the Foundation for Integrated Health ought to be disbanded. It is not a trusted authority on alternative medicine as it is only interested in uncritical advocacy. But most importantly, the explicit guiding hand of the Prince of Wales creates the impossibility of objectiveness. The Prince has the power to bestow great privileges through honours and patronage. His direct involvement in the output of this body makes it highly likely that, consciously or not, people will not act in a manner contrary to his unscientific belief in magical medicine. As Ernst has said in the Guardian, “I have repeatedly been told he cannot tolerate advice which is not 100% in line with his opinion … I think his advisors are all sycophants.”

Despite the obvious constitutional problems and uncritical one-sidedness, the government appears to listen to the Foundation. It gave them £900,000 to set up Ofquack, the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (www.ofquack.org.uk)– the quango charged with the voluntary regulation of nonsense therapies. Even this week, in a bizarre and unexpected twist, the Department decided that it was minded to ask the failing Ofquack if could regulate herbalists. A more unsuitable body is hard to imagine. It is doubtful this will happen. A new government is now likely and it would be well advised to ignore the Foundation and not allow the Prince to meddle in medical matters, either directly, or through his Toad Eaters at the Foundation for Integrated Health.

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This thriving market was in stark contrast to many continental countries where quacks were often hounded out of both their establishments and their countries. Samuel Hahnemann, founder of homeopathy, and Mesmer, inventor of animal magnetism, were both forced to leave their home towns in search of more accepting jurisdictions. London was often the home for the displaced medical salesman.

The reason for this open market in quackery can be traced to the rather weak position of the regular physicians guilds and societies who failed to gain a real monopoly on the healing arts. The three main establishment bodies, created in the Tudor period, were the Royal College of Physicians, who looked after university educated medics, the Barber-Surgeons, and the Society of Apothecaries, the forerunners of the pharmacists. These bodies gave licenses to practice and prosecuted those who transgressed. However, Roy Porter, in his book Quacks, describes how this authority was systematically undermined.

Under Elizabeth, James I and Charles I, a fairly tight lid was kept on medical pretenders. However, after the civil war, the various trade guilds were too closely associated with royal patronage and Charles II, in a twist of irony, managed to exploit the new zeitgeist to his own ends. He used his newly restored royal powers to subvert the licensing scheme by shamelessly issuing his own medical patents that gave nostrum sellers exclusive rights to peddle their powders. This practice grew rapidly under Charles II and subsequent monarchs. Anyone could create a new quack concoction. They simply had to register their unique ingredients with the patent office. Importantly, they did not have to provide any evidence of any sort that their medicine actually worked. The license then gave them exclusive rights to peddle their cures and access to the courts to prosecute anyone who copied them.

This licensing essentially emasculated the power of the medical societies to stamp on quackery. A double standard was created and the quacks exploited their royal blessing to the full. As Porter describes,

…quacks could actually bask in official approval of a kind, much to the faculty’s fury… All these state interventions were represented by empirics [quacks] as tokens of royal blessing, the highest of all testimonials.

‘By Royal Appointment’ was the stamp of approval on these ‘licenses to kill’ as they were called at the time.

The effect of these patents on the public were not medicinal but commercial. Before Charles II, the quack was typically a foreign mountebank, dressed in a ‘zany outfit’, and set up a market stall to sell a few bottles of their elixir. With a patent, the business turned into an industry of mass production with household brand names, marketed effectively in the newspapers, and selling in quantities of millions. Quackery blossomed on the emerging consumer society, and the undermining of the medical establishments created a thriving free market for medicine in England. Many became very rich on the back of their patents and the Crown enjoyed a healthy income from the levied stamp duty.

Charles II was interesting, not for only creating a legal framework for quackery, but for also for taking a very personal interest in unorthodox medicine. Indeed, Charles was to become the de facto head of the lay medical trade. He entertained in his court characters such as the Irish spiritual healer, Valentine Greatrakes (also known as ‘the Stroker’) who claimed he could cure all manner of diseases by laying his hands upon them. Even more wonderfully, Charles revived the practice of laying his own Royal hands on the sick in order to cure them of diseases such as scrofula (a manifestation of TB). More commonly, Charles would use Touch Pieces, coins he had handled and then given to the sick in order to minister his healing gifts. In 21 years, he ‘touched’ over 91,000 people.

Now, in the 17th and 18th century, it would be quite possible to argue that the King’s licenses merely created a level playing field amongst medical practitioners, destroying the vested interests of an Oxford and Cambridge educated elite, and gave the people what they wanted: their consumerist right to have their choice of cure. Indeed, the doctor and the quack both had little to offer the seriously ill person at the time and almost all practices would be judged as quackery by modern standards. Today, we are lucky to be one of the first generations to live in an age of scientific medicine, where we have a deep understanding of the causes of many illnesses and the tools to measure which treatments actually work and are safe. Medical regulation becomes meaningful now that we have objective standards by which we can judge competency and skill. It is therefore rather incredible that this 17th Century Royal tale appears to be replaying itself in the 21st Century.

Prince Charles, heir to the throne, is the modern day head of British alternative medicine. He has set up a campaign and lobbying organisation called the Foundation for Integrated Health, which promotes the wider acceptance of quackery in British life – he calls it ‘integration’. Charles prefers magic homeopathic sugar pills to magic coins. Both though are equally as ridiculous.

He promotes his own elixirs, through another company of his, Duchy Originals. In order to do so, he lobbied the Department of Health as part of their enquiry into allowing more lax regulation for herbal medicine. He obtained one of the first licenses from the MHRA and launched his Duchy range of herbal tinctures. I complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about them and they found Duchy Originals to be making misleading and untruthful claims.

Much more worrying than these ridiculous potions is that fact that Prince Charles is directly involved in trying to establish new double standards in the regulation of medicine in the UK. Just has his namesake did, he is attempting to create new backdoors to allow mountebank practitioners to practice medicine without any of the ethical demands placed on real doctors. His Foundation was given money by the Department of Health to establish the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (more commonly known as Ofquack). This body offers voluntary regulation to a range of quack practitioners. There is no need for these practices to have any evidence base – the CNHC will just certify they have been well trained in their nonsense and give them the Royal and governmental stamp of approval.

Not satisfied with this, he is now lobbying the government to provide even more regulatory protection to herbalists. This has been planned for the best part of a decade now with the government trying to work out how to best protect the public by the dangers posed by unproven herbal remedies. Unfortunately, they appear to be going along with the idea that the way to do regulate pseudo-medicines is the same way you regulate real medicine. The much derided Pitillo Report recommended that Herbal Medicine practitioners be statutorily regulated and have protected title. The report made the fundamental mistake in that assuming a well trained herbal practitioner was a safe practitioner. However, it has never been explained how a training in nonsense can be considered a competent training. Indeed, Professor Colquhoun has exposed how such training is positively dangerous.

Nevertheless, the Prince’s Foundation has leapt on this report with relish. They are pushing hard to allow herbalists to have their own protected status. Matters have now come to head after the same College of Physicians having come out strongly against such regulatory moves. They say,

Statutory regulation of herbalists and Chinese medicine practitioners is ‘completely inappropriate’ and will put patients at risk. “Herbal and traditional medicine which are largely or completely of unproven benefit should be regulated in terms of consumer protection.”

The fear is that such regulation will not prevent the public from being exposed to dangerous practices, but instead give pseudo-medicine a false veneer of respectability and acceptance.

The Prince’s Foundation has not taken the College’s intervention lying down. They have accused the physicians of “washing their hands” of protecting the public. Of course, this is not true. They have stated that such protection should come through existing consumer protection laws, not through state recognition of their status. In other words, herbalists should be prosecuted for making misleading claims or importing dangerous concoctions. Interestingly, Dr Michael Dixon, one of Prince Charles’s chief apologists, views the disagreement in 17th Century terms of the College trying to protecting a ‘trade monopoly’ as doctors. He fails to recognise that, in the 21st century, monopoly in medicine should come through evidence and reason, not regulation or commercial success. Dixon points out that herbalist do cause deaths through inappropriate and dangerous concoctions but offers no evidence to suggest that this was from an ‘uneducated’ minority. Irresponsible and deluded education in alternative medicine is the problem, not the solution.

The Foundation accused its detractors of “abandoning the public to quackery”. Professor George Lewith, another prominent proponent of unproven treatments, says,

Failing to introduce statutory regulation will amount to a Quack’s Charter. It is the incompetent and the irresponsible we need to stop. Not the well-trained, dedicated herbalists who put their patients first.

It is difficult to see how he could be more wrong. Introducing new regulation will indeed be a quack’s charter. How can using existing regulation to stamp out misleading and dangerous quackery be a ‘quacks’ charter’? Prince Charles’s friends need to show how recognising herbalists training will protect the public when it is likely that it is this very training that presents the clearest risk by indoctrinating students with nonsensical ideas about medicine, science and evidence.

Lewith’s aversion to the uncomfortable truths of medical science is made clear by his statement that “Those who oppose statutory regulation should consider the needs of the public and patients first, rather than the status of medical professionals or impractical notions about so-called science.”

The problems with statutory regulation are laid out very clearly on the dcscience web site from a rather good submission to the Department of Health. The Prince’s Foundation has yet to answer any one of these important criticisms and instead resorts to the usual quack trick of misdirection and obfuscation.

Prince Charles’ meddling represents one the greatest threats to the control of dubious medical practices since his namesake’s very similar personal interference. It is clear he wants to create a new golden age of quackery where modern scientific medicine is forced to compete (‘integrate’) with irrational nonsense, where the distinction between evidenced interventions and quackery is blurred by obfuscating regulation. History shows that creating double standards and allowing unfettered free markets in medical practices results in the exploitation of the public by deeply deluded or unscrupulous quacks. Pretending that freedom to practice, after licensing based on nothing more than unevidenced assertion of competence, protects people from harm is so obviously wrong. Let us hope that the government learns the lessons of history and ignores their current meddling Prince.

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Of Lordly acquaintance you boast,
And the Dukes that you dined with yestreen;
Yet an insect’s an insect at most,
Tho’ it crawl on the curl of a Queen!

But what wonderful words: toadying and sycophancy. Where do they come from?

One dictionary definition gives this delightful word history:

The earliest recorded sense (around 1690) of toady is “a little or young toad,” but this has nothing to do with the modern usage of the word. The modern sense has rather to do with the practice of certain quacks or charlatans who claimed that they could draw out poisons. Toads were thought to be poisonous, so these charlatans would have an attendant eat or pretend to eat a toad and then claim to extract the poison from the attendant. Since eating a toad is an unpleasant job, these attendants came to epitomize the type of person who would do anything for a superior, and toadeater (first recorded 1629) became the name for a flattering, fawning parasite. Toadeater and the verb derived from it, toadeat,influenced the sense of the noun and verb toad and the noun toady, so that both nouns could mean “sycophant” and the verb toady could mean “to act like a toady to someone.”

I am not sure if this is true. But if it is, am an appalled that such techniques for quackery promotion do not go on today. The quacks of today have lost their bottle. Who would not delight in seeing a homeopath getting their Saturday intern doing a floor demonstration in Boots the Chemist by eating a live toad and then taking some Nux Vom to ensure she does not throw up. There would be queues around the block to see that, and I would be so impressed I would buy the sugar pills. And, of course, Roger Daltry on stage eating toads in front of Prince Charles whilst singing a medley of hits from Tommy would have really hit the headlines.

The etymology of sycophant may be a little harder and require some Latin and Greek.

My own personal favourite usage of the word appears in the film “101 Dalmatians” when Glenn Close’s Cruella de Vil berates her manservant by saying “What sort of sycophant do you think you are?”. To which he replies, “What sort of sycophant would you like me to be?”

We are told that the word is derived from συκος sykos, “fig”, and φανης fanēs, “to show” so basically sycophant is someone who shows figs. Not a lot of sense there. One explanation is that,

the Greek suko-phantes, “fig-blabbers.” The men of Athens passed a law forbidding the exportation of figs; the law was little more than a dead letter, but there were always found mean fellows who, for their own private ends, impeached those who violated it; hence sycophant came to signify first a government toady, and then a toady generally.

Do we believe that? The Oxford English Dictionary disputes this explanation and instead offers that it comes from an obscene gesture of “sticking the thumb between two fingers” in the shape of a fig. We are told that “The story goes that prominent politicians in ancient Greece held aloof from such inflammatory gestures, but privately urged their followers to taunt their opponents.”

Why this is obscene may be reflected in the fact that sykon has an alternative meaning of vulva.

On that note, I think we had better leave it there.

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The NHS Alliance is not actually part of the NHS, but is an independent body that acts a bit like a club, lobby and research organisation into matters concerning NHS Primary Care Trusts. Professor Edzard Ernst has accused the NHS Alliance of proffering a ‘dangerously one-sided’ view of alternative medicine.

They [The NHS Alliance] are an important organisation and have a responsibility to have a balanced view. What I have seen on their website is disturbingly devoid of any critical evaluation.

Instead of addressing the concerns, Dixon hits back with an ad hominen attack by describing Ernst as ‘graceless’ and saying,

As a commentator who has never practised general practice in this country, Professor Ernst should stop lobbing grenades and telling us how to do our job.

The Alliance publishes a lot on alternative medicine; a surprising amount given that the evidence for the effectiveness of just about any alternative medicine is slim at best. The documents appear to come from either the chairman, Michael Dixon, or from Prince Charles’ quackery lobby group, the Foundation for Integrated Health (FIH). FIH is behind a lot of propaganda trying to push quackery into the NHS, so that it can get its hands on public money. Alternative Medicine traders have a basic problem: their market is limited to those who can afford their expensive and useless treatments – typically the middle class, middle aged and middle educated. If the NHS could refer and pay for treatments, then the market could really open up. The Foundation for Integrated Health furthers this agenda in many ways: a few days ago I wrote about the FIH funded company, GetWellUK, that has taken £200,000 of public money to produce a useless market survey into how patients felt after their GP had sent them off to see a quack.

Dr Michael Dixon OBE is clearly a big fan of alternative medicine, although, of course, he prefers the PR friendly term integrated medicine. Dixon runs his own GP practice in Devon. By the look of it, it is quite a smart place. The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health ran an article about it a few months ago: Integrated Health at Cullompton. The College Surgery boasts a “fully integrated service”. What this means is that after visiting your GP, you can go along a see one of a couple of dozen quacks who rent rooms within the surgery. FIH see this as a model practice, naturally, by bringing in techniques that, in their words, “lay well outside the GP’s sphere”.

Dr Dixon says ‘obviously not all patients can afford complementary help, but many therapists are charging reduced rates. Patients are often keen to try a therapy, if they think it will help with a condition.’ The offering is very wide: from massage, acupuncture and herbal medicine to healing and thought field therapy.

Wouldn’t it be a lot better if the NHS would pay for this? The Surgery offers all sorts of stuff including the batshit but humdrum nonsense of reflexology (your foot is connected to all your other organs though chi conducting meridians, or something), homeopathy (magic sugar pills cure all) and the discredited acupuncture (pins cure all). Dixon also rents rooms to freakier forms of fruitcakery. Frequencies of Brilliance is a technique that “is a unique energy healing technique that involves the activation of energetic doorways on both the front and back of the body.”

These doorways are opened through a series of light touches. This activation introduces high-level Frequencies into the emotional and physical bodies. It works within all the cells and with the entire nervous system which activates new areas of the brain.

Frequencies of Brilliance is referred to as a self-remembrance work because the activation that occurs as the body is touched awakens at the quantum level your spiritual aspect.[sic]

First class pseudoscience. I think that this is probably ‘well outside of the GP’s sphere’. I, for one, would be very alarmed if a colleage of my GP wanted to energetically activate my front and back doorways. 

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