Charles and the quacking watchdog

The government's new body to oversee complementary medicine is less about regulation than recognition.

Prince Charles' Foundation for Integrated Health will oversee the system, with £900,000 of government money, regulating homeopathy, aromatherapy and reflexology. Moreover, a new Herbal Medicines Advisory Committee will be set up to provide expert safety and quality advice to ministers.

Complementary and alternative medicine is a dodgy area, with anybody able to set themselves up as an expert and charge people for treatment and advice. For example, 'Dr' Gillian McKeith has made a fortune through TV and books, promoting herself as the World's Leading Nutritionist and dispensing dubious New Age advice, despite not possessing a widely recognised qualification in the subject.

But a more fundamental problem is that most of this 'medicine' is pure quackery, by definition. If these treatments really worked, they wouldn't be alternative at all, they'd just be medicine full stop. By setting up an official body to regulate these things, the government is sending out the message that these are valid theories and therapies, sitting as equals alongside mainstream healthcare. It is not 'cracking down' on crackpot theories, as some suggest, so much as incorporating them into the NHS.

Moreover, Charles is a big advocate of these therapies. So making him the frontman for this watchdog looks, to quote Jane Fonda on another issue, like 'putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank'. Instead of providing a critique of this lamentable retreat from scientific medicine, this initiative provides official approval.

More checks on alternative health, BBC News, 22 December 2004