Why just can't quit the snake oil

[Guest guest]

Why the concerted attempt to discredit homoeopathy all of a sudden? We'll

see....

____________________________________

http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,11381,1555834,00.html

Why just can't quit the snake oil

Thursday August 25, 2005

The Guardian

In 1982 the Prince of Wales was elected president of the BMA, and promptly

used this platform to lecture doctors on the attractions of healing.

Naturally, he anticipated some resistance. " Perhaps, " he told the doctors,

" we just have to accept it is God's will that the unorthodox individual is

doomed to years of frustration, ridicule and failure in order to act out his

role in the scheme of things, until his day arrives and mankind is ready to

receive his message. "

Years of frustration passed, but mankind did not get any readier. The Prince

persisted. A speech last year, recommending Gerson therapy, a regime

involving much juice and coffee enemas, attracted, if possible, more

ridicule than any of his previous observations on alternative medicine. The

prince said he knew of a lady, diagnosed with terminal cancer, for whom

Gerson had proved a real lifesaver.

The most forceful rebuke, on that occasion, came from Professor

Baum, the eminent oncologist, who wrote an open letter in the British

Medical Journal, beseeching to be more careful in recommending

unproven alternative therapies to patients with life-threatening diseases.

" My authority comes with a knowledge built on 40 years of study and 25

years' active involvement in cancer research, " Baum pointed out. " Your power

and authority rest on an accident of birth. " Believers in God's will, of

course, might see this accident differently.

persisted. He commissioned his biggest yet challenge to conventional

medicine: a report, to be published this autumn, which reportedly argues

that the wider provision of complementary therapies such as homeopathy could

be cost-effective for the NHS. It has been prepared by

Smallwood, a former economics adviser, whose medical qualifications are

identical to Prince 's: nil.

It is pointed out that Smallwood has nothing to do with the Prince of

Wales's own Foundation for Integrated Medicine, which believes in " promoting

a holistic and integrated approach to healthcare which engages with all

aspects of a patient's being including mind, body and spirit and which takes

into consideration environmental, psychosocial and nutritional aspects of

health " . It also believes in " the intrinsic healing capacity of every

person " .

It was not this foundation, but the Prince of Wales himself who commissioned

the forthcoming report, of which a draft has been seen by Professor Edzard

Ernst, of the University of Exeter and a contributor to this newspaper.

Ernst has commented that the report features " outrageous estimates without

any strong evidence to support them " and " is based on such poor science, it

is hair-raising " .

Of course the final draft may be different, but given its authorship, and in

the absence of new research which might justify extending NHS provision of

complementary therapies, there is every reason to believe the prince's

latest plug for magic-based medicine will be received in the traditional

fashion: denounced by doctors, and supported by a few like-minded

aficionados of coffee enemas, cranial osteopathy, and Hahnemann's

distilled water. If, as it appears, has attempted on this occasion

to shape public health policy, there will presumably be further questions

about his increasingly ambitious assessment of his constitutional

importance.

Since he first declared his antipathy to orthodox treatment, this pattern of

events has been repeated so often, and with so little sign that the prince

is getting anywhere in revolutionising the health service, that the most

interesting aspect of his interventions has ceased to be what he is saying

(for these hallowed truths are, in any case, unchanging), and become,

instead, the intensity of his need to keep on saying it. It is time, in

short, for the thing to be considered holistically, taking into

consideration the full environmental, psychosocial and nutritional context.

Ridicule me if you like, but I intuit a quite unusual kind pathology at work

here. It has been noted, for years, that the prince's default mood is one of

extravagant self-pity, usually on the basis that no one

understands/appreciates him, everybody mocks/despises him. But this

certainty, so essential to the prince's wellbeing, is apt to be shaken,

regularly, by the fact of his being one of the most fortunate men alive.

Thus, the prince has become dependent, one might almost say addicted, to the

regular supply of condemnation required to trigger a sensation of

victimhood, and thus, a truly satisfying bout of self-pity. (It seems no

coincidence that his new report - a rather obvious plea for more Baum-style

critiques - arrives at a time of personal fulfilment, shortly after marriage

to the woman he loves.)

Why is medicine, unlike history teaching, or conventional farming, the

subject of the prince's most sustained, deliberately ignorant and vexatious

challenges? Because over time, hardened to normal doses of criticism, the

prince has become dependent on stronger and stronger levels of denunciation,

and discovered that the collective hostility of the medical profession is a

more powerful drug than the much milder indignation of the academic or

agricultural establishments.

Without actually laying my hands on the prince, I am reluctant to be more

definite, and it remains quite possible that a simple case of blocked energy

explains his pointless and faintly creepy obsession with other people's

diseases. Alternatively, it could stem from a bad experience in a surgery

around 60 years ago. Add to that his growing belief in the sacred dimension

of his office and you can see how the prince may, quite genuinely, have come

to believe that he possesses healing powers, like absolute monarchs of the

past.

Unlike his predecessors, who seem to have specialised, with some reluctance,

in sufferers from scrofula, generously proposes to heal us one and

all, regardless of ridicule and frustration and the rather steep cost to the

NHS. Eventually, mankind will be ready to receive his message. Not today,

though.

[Guest guest]

Probably because it's cutting into their revenue. It always comes down to $$$$,

never mind what's best for people.

Kay

Why just can't quit the snake oil

Why the concerted attempt to discredit homoeopathy all of a sudden? We'll

see....

____________________________________

http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,11381,1555834,00.html

Why just can't quit the snake oil

Thursday August 25, 2005

The Guardian