Charles, the Alternative Prince

by Edzard Ernst

Prince Charles has entertained a long-standing love affair with alternative medicine. This book describes his passion as it developed during the last 40 years. The Prince's beliefs, opinions, and ambitions are critically assessed against the background of the scientific evidence. In most instances, the contrast could not be starker. Thus, Charles' tenacious promotion of unproven, disproven, and occasionally harmful alternative therapies turns out to be little more than the pipe dream of a self-declared enemy of the Enlightenment. The book portrays our future king, reviews the evidence on alternative medicine, and inspires critical thinking.

Genres: History

277 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 1, 2022

Reviews

[Baal Of · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edzard Ernst started as a true-believer in SCAM (So-Called Alternative Medicine) and in fact setup the department of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter in England. He grew up with a family doctor who was a homeopath. The difference between Ernst and the vast majority of promoters of SCAM is that he was willing to put his beliefs under rigorous scientific scrutiny, i.e. he had actual intellectual integrity, something utterly alien to Charles (I will not be using his title), Mehmet Oz, Mike Adams, Alex Jones, and virtually every promoter of alternative medicine. As Ernst spent decades researching SCAM he found that most of them failed on both effectivity and safety, and thus he changed his beliefs. This behavior enraged Charles, and still upsets believers in SCAM modalities. Ernst is far kinder to Charles than I am, going out of his way to acknowledge that Charles thinks he is doing good and that his motives come from a place of caring. For me it is far more important that Charles is doing active harm by trying to undermine rigorous medical research by introducing muddlehead mysticism, and trying to lower the quality of evidence required for acceptance of medical practice.

This book is a breakdown by subject of Charles's beliefs and activities, and as such it serves as a neatly encapsulated primer on SCAM including brief historical backgrounds, how they've been tested and (mostly) failed, and the continue promotion of those modalities despite the overwhelmingly negative evidence. Charles himself has been confronted over and over with evidence as to why he wrong, and explanations of how his thinking is fallacious, but he is either too arrogant (due to celebrity? wealth? all of the above plus other factors?) or too stupid to grasp the underlying epistemological arguments, and so he continues using his position to promote nonsense. This continued promotion results in worse health and financial outcomes for vast numbers of people. Spending money on worthless SCAM modalities is not helping, it is causing active harm.

There are plenty of books covering SCAM that are more in depth. Because of the scope of Charles's interests given that he hasn't met a SCAM modality he doesn't believe, so long as they are based on the naturalistic fallacy, it would be a much larger book to go deep into every single subject. Ernst does a great job of covering the key points from the position of a true expert, and in fact in many cases a primary researcher.