Colonic irrigation courtesy of the taxpayer

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 glands

By 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.

Dalrymple mère and the homœopath

Dalrymple writes that his mother

suddenly suffered from a non-life-threatening but disfiguring skin condition of her scalp that caused her great distress.

But

old ladies in their 80s worried about their appearance are not high on the National Health Service’s list of priorities; and this, combined with a severe shortage of dermatologists, meant that she could not be seen on the NHS for 18 months. In dermatology the Grim Reaper is used as an auxiliary in the government’s Waiting Time Initiative.

So Dalrymple mère

went private. Even the private dermatologist had a waiting list of nine months, however, so she chose another. He prescribed something that made her condition much worse. She consulted another, with the same unhappy result.

Finally she sought out a homœopath and,

to both my pleasure and my chagrin, his ministrations cured her. At least, she got better after them.

In the circumstances it was difficult, says Dalrymple, to persuade Dalrymple mère that homœopathy had

no rational basis, quite the reverse, and that properly conducted scientific trials had demonstrated its inefficacy. She had undertaken the only trial that interested her, and it was successful. What more could a patient ask?