The Department of Health’s tie-up with the Prince of Wales’s Foundation for Integrated Health is, writes Dalrymple,
an invincible alliance between bullying bureaucracy and social snobbery, between administrative cynicism and ignorant folly.
Providing homœopathy on the NHS
is part of the persistent attempt by the government further to debase and demoralise the medical profession. The point is not to raise the status of alternative medicine, as Prince Charles has no doubt been gulled into believing, but to lower the status of orthodox medicine.
This is because
doctors are trusted by the population, while politicians most certainly are not: therefore they, the doctors, represent a danger to the politicians. The people who will pay the price for the wicked folly of the Department of Health will be the British people, who will come to be treated by a professional body of uninterested timeservers while their rulers seek first-rate medical treatment elsewhere — that is to say abroad.
Dalrymple has no objection to irrational whims involving
- colonic irrigation
- healing crystals
- chakras in the earth
- hopi candles
But he sees no reason why he or any other taxpayer should fork out for them.
No doubt the Department of Health will present its position on alternative medicine
as being broad-minded and socially inclusive. There is another way of looking at it: the Department of Health is embezzling taxpayer’s funds for partially hidden, political purposes.
Charles II touches a patient for tuberculous swelling of the lymph glandsBy all means
let the Prince of Wales spread propaganda for his brand of hocus-pocus. Let him touch people for the King’s Evil, if he and they so wish — the revival of the ceremony might add to the gaiety of the nation. But medicine is too serious a matter to be left to amateurs such as the Department of Health.
