Convinced of the ancestral wisdom of tribal societies, Charles idolised the pre-modern world. For him, the rationality of science was abhorrent. Believing in the hereditary principle, he invoked God’s power to appoint him as the spokesman for people’s unspoken concerns. ‘I have come to realise,’ he said, ‘that my entire life so far has been motivated by a desire to heal – to heal the dismembered landscape and the poisoned soil; the cruelly shattered townscape where harmony has been replaced by cacophony; to heal the divisions between intuitive and rational thought, between mind, body and soul so that the temples of our humanity can once again be lit by a sacred flame.’
Such thoughts were unusual for an heir to the throne. Some would criticise Charles for his pretensions of intellect, others for being a fantasist. To illustrate his so-called ‘crankiness’, they repeated gossip about Charles’s interest in a book about aliens recommended by Charlie Palmer-Tomkinson.
In hindsight, the doctors’ response to Charles’s speech was generous. Recognising his insecurity and pride, they paid lip service to his spiritual values. In a deferential gesture, Sir James Watt, the president of the Royal Society of Medicine, organised a series of eight seminars and a working party within the BMA to examine complementary medicine. Charles himself attended three meetings at the Royal Society, but was impatient with anyone advocating exclusive reliance on conventional medicine. ‘Science,’ he had told the doctors, ‘has tried to assume a monopoly – or rather a tyranny – over our understanding of the world around us … We are only now beginning to understand the disastrous results.’ His hostility towards drugs reflected his anger about doctors’ separation of the soul from the body. A healthy body, he told his audience, depended on treating soul and mind as one. His listeners were bewildered by his belief in the ability of the ‘soul’ to cure cancer. ‘Alternative medicine,’ one doctor would retort, ‘should remain the luxury of the well-to-do hypochondriac.’ The BMA issued a report concluding that complementary medicine was worthless, but it still approved further discussion.
Undeterred by his limited progress, Charles continued to argue that natural foods, proper education, sport and a healthier lifestyle, rather than drugs and hospital treatment, were the cures for illness. He visited the Bristol Centre, an ‘alternative’ drug-free cancer clinic established in 1981, and regularly championed environmental policies. He converted the Duchy of Cornwall’s farms to produce only organic food. Seemingly unaware of his apparent fickleness, he repeated the attacks against the doubters that he had first voiced in his BMA speech in 1982: ‘I have often thought that one of the least attractive traits of various professional bodies and institutions is the deeply ingrained suspicion and outright hostility which they can exhibit towards anything unorthodox or unconventional.’
With the tenacity of a proselytiser, in 1987 Charles began a campaign to make complementary medicine mainstream. The Maurice Laing Foundation was persuaded to donate £1.5 million for the first British university department devoted to the subject at Exeter University. Supported by Charles’s regular visits, in 1993 the university appointed Edzard Ernst, a forty-five-year-old medical doctor, to become the country’s first professor of complementary medicine. Ernst appeared an ideal choice. As the director of rehabilitation medicine at the Vienna Medical School, he had led a department of 120 in a two-thousand-bed hospital, and like many German doctors had routinely prescribed complementary medicines. During his ten-year contract at Exeter, he was tasked to ‘develop research into the techniques and effectiveness of the various branches of complementary medicine and to encourage the assimilation of appropriate complementary medicine techniques into orthodox medicine’. He anticipated bringing his skills as a scientist, university professor and clinical practitioner to subject complementary medicine to its first-ever evaluation based on impartial scientific trials. To test its credibility, additional staff would be funded by grants from government and private institutions.
Charles was optimistic that Ernst’s work would encourage British doctors to integrate complementary medicine into the NHS’s conventional treatments. But he failed to anticipate the German doctor’s refusal to judge all complementary medicines uniformly. Among more than four hundred alternative therapies and food supplements, Ernst sharply distinguished between herbs, acupuncture, osteopathy, aromatherapy, oils, diets and homeopathy.
Charles’s particular interest was homeopathy. True believers prescribed highly diluted doses of natural substances to treat bee stings, snakebites and mushroom poisoning, as well as more serious illnesses. By producing the same symptoms, they argued, the body would automatically stimulate its natural defences. Until 1993, tests of homeopathy had produced results ranging between encouraging, inconclusive, and having no effect whatever. In extreme cases, patients who relied exclusively on complementary medicine had died. Charles dismissed such findings as unreliable, and expected Ernst to confirm his own beliefs.
To supplement Ernst’s efforts, in 1993 Charles asked his friend Hugh van Cutsem and Ian Marks, a Cadbury’s philanthropist, to recruit Simon Mills, a herbal practitioner, to establish what became the Foundation for Integrated Health, which he expected to prove that mainstream medicine and complementary therapies could work together. The finance would be provided by Bach Barcapel, a charity funded by a manufacturer of complementary medicines. Mills accepted the position, but progress was slow, and four years later a dissatisfied Charles commissioned a working party to examine the obstacles. Called ‘Integrated Healthcare’, the subsequent report suggested ways to provide the public with information about and access to both types of medical care, and how to increase research, training and regulation of unorthodox treatments. To implement the recommendations, Marks appointed Michael Fox, the chief executive of an NHS trust, as the first director of a new foundation that would be financed by Charles. The appointment was strange, given that Fox was not convinced of the benefits of complementary medicine.
Fox met Charles six times a year to describe his progress. By 1998 he had barely started to overcome the medical profession’s resistance to the introduction of complementary medicine into the NHS. The prince, once again, was not pleased – as Mark Bolland explained to Fox, he was ‘not used to opposition’. Then, in 1998, Charles was confronted by an unexpected challenge.
After five years of research, Edzard Ernst changed his opinion. Applying scientific methods, he and his team of academics had become disillusioned. Too many arguments in defence of alternative medicine represented a flight from reason into the absurd. Manufacturers of homeopathic remedies were attempting to persuade patients that worthless but expensive coloured water was beneficial. Ernst rejected such chicanery. Placebos which generated a ‘false positive result’ with no medical effect, he decided, were not harmless. Sick people were dying as a result of relying on pseudo-science (including acupuncture and chiropractic) rather than receiving conventional treatment.
The country’s only professor of complementary medicine was not only arguing against his own specialty, but was critical of Charles for being ‘unwilling to distinguish between real health care and blatant quackery’. Ernst even criticised Exeter University’s BSc degree in complementary medicine as ‘a course in claptrap taught by uncritical believers to brainwash youngsters with mystical nonsense’. In his opinion, the supporters of complementary medicine, especially the fourteen thousand people registered with the Federation of Spiritual Healers, were unqualified preachers who resisted independent scientific research, especially that by medically trained academics.
To bridge the chasm between Charles and the medical profession, James Watt persuaded Lord Winston, a pioneer of in vitro fertilisation, that the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee should take up the subject of complementary medicine. Simon Mills, the peers agreed after a series of meetings, would write the committee’s report. To Mills’s relief, by the end of their hearings the peers recognised complementary medicine’s popularity, acknowledged some benefits, and accepted that some practitioners were reputable. However, pummelled by the searing scientific criticism directed at the new sciences by the biologist Lewis Wolpert – ‘That guy took the air out of our lungs!’ admitted Mills – the peers were sceptical about the value of most unorthodox therapies. The public, as Mills was forced to admit in his final report, was unprotected against the majority of untrained, unregulated and ‘incompetent’ practitioners,