The Aristocracy at Hogwarts

The world is filled with complex currents where intermingle causation and correlation, cause and effect vs. accidental association. Did cats cause The Plague? Are Liberty, Free Enterprise and Societal Advance symbiotic? Did Art rise as a result of the Catholic Church; if so is religious faith necessary for good Art? The Earth seems to be warming and we are burning fossil fuels, are those two observations linked? The problem is that we humans remember and correlate well. People remember the black cat that crossed in front of them the day of their car accident. It is an easy connection.

There are a number of problems facing the observer who seeks cause and effect. One is good intentions. Good intentions is never enough. The next is hubris where the individual, often through ignorance, raises his perceptive ability above the hard demands of science. The third is corruption where judgment is compromised by monetary or philosophical bias.

Which brings us to the Royal Trifecta, Prince Charles, who has all three.

In 2004, the Prince, in a speech, added an endorsement of an 'alternative' cancer treatment under which patients were treated with, among other things, coffee enemas designed to strip the gut of harmful pollutants. This prompted a rather harsh open letter to the British Medical Journal from a prominent surgeon, Professor Michael Baum.

In 2009,  the Prince's Duchy Originals company claimed that a homeopathic 'tincture' it was selling  was capable of treating cold and flu symptoms. (The remedy contained a highly diluted extract of the root of echinacea plants, which are traditionally used in Native American medicine.) The Advertising Standards Authority [ASA] censured his company because the benefit of the therapy as never been proved. Edzard Ernst, the emeritus Professor of Complementary Medicine at Exeter University  accused the Prince of 'exploiting a gullible public' for his firm's financial gain.
Blum seems to have escaped the Prince's wrath; Ernst did not.

Ernst had an interesting history. He was originally hired to head a revolutionary new unit at Exeter University to investigate the safety and effectiveness of complementary and alternative medicine. His appointment had all the alternative community abuzz. Prince Charles invited him to Highgrove, where the herbs Black Cohosh (to treat PMT) and Siberian Ginseng (to increase stamina) are grown in a medicinal herb garden. 'It was fun to see all the Prince's diseased fruit trees,' Ernst recalled. 'He's against pesticides and says he can keep plants healthy by natural means, or cuddling them, or whatever. Well, they were not bearing fruit when I visited. They had some strange disease.'

To the surprise--and chagrin--of many, Ernst began actually to investigate alternative medicine claims using scientific principles. He produced a blind study that showed so-called 'spiritual healers' to be no better at curing chronic pain than actors who were pretending to have healing powers. He showed that the success rate of acupuncturists attempting to stop patients smoking was unaffected by the use of fake needles (which, designed like stage daggers, did not pierce the skin). His team began to be subjected to threats and vicious public smears. At one point the police came to his office to train his people on letter bomb detection. So it is when truth meets personal interest.

In 2005, the Prince's Foundation For Integrated Health — an organization he had founded to further public acceptance of complementary and alternative medicine — sent Ernst a draft of a government sponsored leaflet entitled Complementary Healthcare: A Guide For Patients. It included a section devoted to 'evidence' regarding the effectiveness of common alternative treatments. Ernst offered to correct the scientific errors in the leaflet, but the offer was rejected. Instead it was simply published (at the taxpayer's expense) without the 'evidence' section. 'Because the guide seemed like a promotional brochure for quackery, I felt it was my moral and ethical duty to speak out,' Ernst said. He called the guide 'frankly inaccurate and over-optimistically misleading' in an interview.

A few months later, Ernst was asked by a newspaper to pass comment on a draft report by the economist Christopher Smallwood which had been personally commissioned by Prince Charles, and was to be handed to Government ministers. It claimed that complementary and alternative remedies were cost-effective, could save hundreds of millions of pounds, and should be available on the NHS. Ernst called it 'outrageous and deeply flawed'.

On September 22, Sir Michael Peat, then the Prince's Private Secretary, wrote to Steve Smith, the Vice-Chancellor of Exeter University, demanding that Ernst be disciplined. Although eventually exonerated in late 2006, Ernst had incurred around £10,000 in legal fees. University fundraisers, whose efforts his unit's financial future relied on, stopped treating Ernst as a priority, or even returning his calls, he said.

Soon, all 15 members of his staff were sent letters informing them that their contracts would not be renewed. 

The unit dwindled, and in 2011 Ernst was ushered off into retirement and his team soon disbanded. 

Their Unit Of Complementary Medicine Research, the world's only academic institution devoted to critical study of alternative therapies, was closed.

There will be differing views of this event but it should be seen, basically, for what it is: This is not a fight between differing views, it is a fight between people who live by scientific principles and those who believe themselves not governed by them, for one or many reasons, none of them good.