Prince Charles – The Quackometer Blog

Dame Shirley Porter Funded Prince Charles’ Political Report on NHS Alternative Medicine

6th April, 2010 26

After writing about how Prince Charles’ charity, the Foundation for Integrated Health, is now under police investigation for possible fraud, it has become clear how I have missed one of the most shocking aspects of the Smallwood Report. The report has proved to be very controversial because it was commissioned by Prince Charles and was sent directly to government ministers in an attempt to influence them to fund the provision [read more…]

Police Investigate The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health

4th April, 2010 14

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 [read more…]

Meddling Princes, Medical Regulation and Licenses to Kill

10th December, 2009 6

The Eighteenth Century in England was the Golden Age of Quackery, with London being a world capital for mountebanks, charlatans and other practitioners of irregular medicine. Consumers in Georgian England had access to an unparalleled selection of medical entrepreneurship from regular doctors, lay quacks, foreigners with exotic elixirs, and even preachers such as John Wesley (as we saw a few weeks ago). So popular were these various tonics and treatments [read more…]

There Goes My Knighthood

5th May, 2009 30

Prince Charles’ company, Duchy Originals, has today been told by the Advertising Standards Authority to stop making misleading and untruthful claims in its advertising and to not make claims for its detox products that it cannot substantiate. Earlier in the year, Duchy Originals launched three new herbal tinctures. The launch was met with derision, and claims that the Prince’s company was misleading people into thinking that the products actually [read more…]

Duchy Originals Pork Pies

11th March, 2009 26

Prince Charles is being labeled a quack in today’s news. And not a moment too soon. The BBC report that “Prince Charles has been accused of exploiting the public in times of hardship by launching what a leading scientist calls a “dodgy” detox mix.” Dodgy Originals, as now they will become known, is selling three herbal tinctures. Two of them, echinachea and hypericum, are the first herbal preparations to be [read more…]

The Graceless Dr Michael Dixon OBE

25th February, 2009 47

In today’s Pulse, the magazine for GPs, a spat between Dr Michael Dixon and critics of alternative medicine has been reported. Dr Dixon, chairman of the NHS Alliance, was accused of breaking GMC guidelines by issuing ‘misleading or incorrect’ statements about alternative medicine. 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 [read more…]

The Northern Ireland NHS Alternative Medicine ‘Trial’

23rd February, 2009 26

Various news sources and pro alternative medicine web sites have been telling us this week that a trial involving NHS GPs in Northern Ireland has shown that referring patients for homeopathy, reflexology, acupuncture and other CAM has highly successful outcomes. I see this as nothing short of an attempted fraud to extract NHS money for traders in quackery. Let me explain. For example, the Princes Foundation for Integrated Health tells [read more…]

Andy Burman Resigns From Ofquack

5th August, 2008 16

Andy Burman, Chief Executive of the British Dietetic Association, appears to have resigned his post from the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (Ofquack). This news follows my recent criticism on this site of the BDA for not doing enough to educate the public about the difference between pseudoscientific Nutritional Therapists (as to be ‘regulated’ by Ofquack) and professionally trained and regulated dietitians (as currently represented by the BDA). This came [read more…]

Healing the Wounds of Alternative Medicine

28th July, 2008 7

It has not been a good few weeks to be a supporter of alternative medicine. We have seen reports that GP prescriptions of homeopathic remedies are in terminal collapse. A Nutritional therapist has had to get their insurers to fork out hundreds of thousands of pounds after a patient was left brain damaged. And of course, genocidal maniacs appear to be able to shift their talents quite easily into becoming [read more…]

Bravewell and the Prince

11th June, 2008 34

Quackery in the UK has friends in the highest places. Despite constitutional restrictions on the monarch’s role in politics, our heir to the throne, Prince Charles, has decided to meddle most wholeheartedly in how public healthcare is provided. The main channel for this interference is the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health. This organisation claims not to promote alternative medicine, but instead to “offer healthcare which makes use of all appropriate [read more…]