Monthly Archives: January 2015
In the past, I have been involved in several court cases where patients had complained about mistreatment by charlatans. Similarly I have acted as an expert witness for the General Medical Council in similar circumstances.
So, it is true, quacks are sometimes being held to account by their victims. But, generally speaking, patients seem to complain very rarely when they fall in the hands of even the most incompetent of quacks.
Here is one telling reminder showing how long it can take until a complaint is finally filed.
Dr Julian Kenyon is, according to his website, an integrated medicine physician and Medical Director of the Dove Clinic for Integrated Medicine, Winchester and London. Dr Julian Kenyon is Founder-Chairman of the British Medical Acupuncture Society in 1980 and Co-Founder of the Centre for the Study of Complementary Medicine in Southampton and London where he worked for many years before starting The Dove Clinic in 2000. He is also Founder/President of the British Society for Integrated Medicine and is an established authority in the field of complementary treatment approaches for a wide range of medical conditions. He has written approximately 20 books and has had many academic papers published in peer review journals* and has several patents to his name. He graduated from the University of Liverpool with a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery and subsequently with a research degree, Doctor of Medicine. In 1972, he was appointed a Primary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh.
*[I found only 4 on Medline]
Kenyon has been on sceptics’ radar for a very long time. For instance, he is one of the few UK doctors who use ‘LIVE BLOOD ANALYSIS’, a bogus diagnostic method that can harm patients through false-negative or false-positive diagnoses. A 2003 undercover investigation for BBC 1 South’s ‘Inside Out’ accused Dr Julian Kenyon of using yet another spurious diagnostic test at his clinic near Winchester. Kenyon has, for many years, been working together with George Lewith, another of the country’s ‘leading’ complementary doctors. In 1994, the two published an article about their co-operation; here is its abstract:
This paper outlines the main research effort that has taken place within the Centre for the Study of Complementary Medicine over the last 10 years. It demonstrates the Centre’s expertise and interest in a whole variety of areas, including the social implications and development of complementary medicine, clinical trial methodology, the evaluation of complementary medical machinery, the effects of electromagnetic fields on health and the investigation of the subtle energetic processes involved in complementary medicine. Our future plans are outlined.
Lewith and Kenyon have been using a technique called electrodermal testing for more than 20 years. Considering the fact that the two doctors authored a BMJ paper which concluded that electrodermal machines couldn’t detect environmental allergies, this seems more than a little surprising.
Using secret filming, ‘Inside Out’ showed Dr Kenyon testing a six-year-old boy and then deciding that he is sensitive to dust mites. Later, Dr Kenyon insists that he made his diagnosis purely on the boy’s symptoms and that he didn’t use the machine to test for dust mites. The BBC then took the boy for a conventional skin prick test, which suggested he didn’t have any allergies at all. But Dr Kenyon then says the conventional test may not be accurate: “He may be one of the 10% who actually are negative to the skin tests but benefit from measures to reduce dust mite exposure.”
Despite this very public disclosure, Kenyon was able to practice unrestrictedly for many years.
In December 2014, it was reported in the Hampshire Chronicle that Dr Kenyon eventually did, after a complaint from a patient, end up in front of the General Medical Council’s conduct tribunal. The panel heard that, after a 20-minute consultation, which cost £300, Dr Kenyon told one terminally-ill man with late-stage cancer: “I am not claiming we can cure you, but there is a strong possibility that we would be able to increase your median survival time with the relatively low-risk approaches described here.” He also made bold statements about the treatment’s supposed benefits to an undercover reporter who posed as the husband of a woman with breast cancer.
After considering the full details of the case, Ben Fitzgerald, for the General Medical Council, had called for Dr Kenyon to be suspended, but the panel’s chairman Dr Surendra Kumar said Dr Kenyon’s misconduct was not serious enough to warrant a ban. The panel eventually imposed restrictions on Kenyon’s licence lasting for 12 months.
I estimate that patients are exposed to quackery from doctors and alternative practitioners thousands of times every day. Why then, I ask myself, do so few of them complain? Here are some of the possible answers to this important question:
- They do not dare to.
- They feel embarrassed.
- They don’t know how to.
- They cannot be bothered and fear the agro.
- They fail to identify quackery and fall for the nonsense they are being told.
- They even might perceive benefit from treatments which, in fact, are pure quackery.
Whatever the reasons, I think it is regrettable that not far more quacks are held to account – regardless of whether the charlatan in question as studied medicine or not. If you disagree, consider this: not filing a complaint means that many more patients will be put at risk.
The Science Media Centre (SMC) in London is a unit that aims to facilitate the interactions between scientists, journalists and the media. During the last 10 years or so, they have invited me several times to present my research to journalists, and Fiona Fox who heads the SMC became a trusted friend and ally. Her letter reproduced below (with her permission, of course) is deeply touching for me; if it were the only reaction to my new book that I ever received, it would have been worth the effort writing the memoire.
Dear Edzard,
I have just finished your book and wanted to write to say how much I loved it. It was fascinating in every way and a compelling read.
However I also found the full story of the end of the unit profoundly depressing. I was a fan of the unit’s work from the SMC’s rather narrow perspective of science in the media. Given the percentage of the population who use some form of alternative medicine I was very, very keen to ensure that the SMC helped to bring the best scientific evidence to bear on the media debates. However as you highlight in the book finding academics who are doing top quality clinical research in this field is not easy – all roads led us to your unit. Since the unit has closed the amount we have been able to do proactively on this issue has declined dramatically which I fear is a loss to the wider public and to the public understanding of medical science.
However until reading your book I had not understood the whole story about the closure of the unit and now feel that the scientific community should have fought much harder to save it. If it had just run out of steam and funds that would be fine – but your claim that it was closed down in part because of the influence of people who do not want to see critical research carried out in this field really is bad news for us all. All of us who care about the importance of bringing the best evidence to bear on contested areas of science should reflect on why we lost one of the best units in this field.
I also wanted to say how important it is that you spoke to a trusted science editor about your concerns about the Smallwood report. It feels to me like people were looking very narrowly at rules governing the media release of a report without considering the wider ethics of what you did. Had you remained quiet about your concern at the time the mass media would almost certainly have been full of headlines championing the need for alternative medicine on the NHS and may well have reported inaccurate facts from this ostensibly authoritative report. Worse still it looks likely the authors may even have used your involvement as a badge of credibility to enhance the media coverage. Your commitment to accurate reporting of alternative medicine has been second only to your research record and challenging myths and inaccuracies does indeed often involve taking courage and embracing the media interest when it most matters.
I will certainly be buying the book for my friends inside and outside science. While it is ostensibly about one man’s research career, it is for me about something much more profound..it’s about courage it takes to stand up for the very best science in areas that are contested in wider society. There is not enough of that courage in science but there is a huge amount of it in the pages of this book. I hope you can remember that the work of the unit will live on for many, many years to come, better informing the debate and proving the evidence base for those who want to follow in your footsteps.
Cheers
Fiona
Today, I had a great day: two wonderful book reviews, one in THE TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION and one in THE SPECTATOR. But then I did something that I shouldn’t have done – I looked whether someone had already written a review on the Amazon site. There were three reviews; the first was nice the last was very stupid and the third one almost made me angry. Here it is:
I was at Exeter when Ernst took over what was already a successful Chair in CAM. I am afraid this part of it appears to be fiction. It was embarrassing for those of us CAM scientists trying to work there, but the university nevertheless supported his right to freedom of speech through all the one-sided attacks he made on CAM. Sadly, it became impossible to do genuine CAM research at Exeter, as one had to either agree with him that CAM is rubbish, or go elsewhere. He was eventually asked to leave the university, having spent the £2.M charity pot set up by Maurice Laing to help others benefit from osteopathy. CAM research funding is so tiny (in fact it is pretty much non-existent) and the remedies so cheap to make, that there is not the kind of corruption you find in multi-billion dollar drug companies (such as that recently in China) or the intrigue described. Subsequently it is not possible to become a big name in CAM in the UK (which may explain the ‘about face’ from the author when he found that out?). The book bears no resemblance to what I myself know about the field of CAM research, which is clearly considerably more than the author, and I would recommend anyone not to waste time and money on this particular account.
I know, I should just ignore it, but outright lies have always made me cross!
Here are just some of the ‘errors’ in the above text:
- There was no chair when I came.
- All the CAM scientists – not sure what that is supposed to mean.
- I was never asked to leave.
- The endowment was not £ 2 million.
- It was not set up to help others benefit from osteopathy.
It is a pity that this ‘CAM-expert’ hides behind a pseudonym. Perhaps he/she will tell us on this blog who he/she is. And then we might find out how well-informed he/she truly is and how he/she was able to insert so many lies into such a short text.
A recent article in the BMJ about my new book seems to have upset fellow researchers of alternative medicine. I am told that the offending passage is the following:
“Too much research on complementary therapies is done by people who have already made up their minds,” the first UK professor of complementary medicine has said. Edzard Ernst, who left his chair at Exeter University early after clashing with the Prince of Wales, told journalists at the Science Media Centre in London that, although more research into alternative medicines was now taking place, “none of the centres is anywhere near critical enough.”
Following this publication, I received indignant inquiries from colleagues asking whether I meant to say that their work lacks critical thinking. As this is a valid question, I will try to answer it the best I presently can.
Any critical evaluation of alternative medicine has to yield its fair share of negative conclusions about the value of alternative medicine. If it fails to do that, one would need to assume that most or all alternative therapies generate more good than harm – and very few experts (who are not proponents of alternative medicine) would assume that this can possibly be the case.
Put differently, this means that a researcher or a research group that does not generate its fair share of negative conclusions is suspect of lacking a critical attitude. In a previous post, I have addressed this issue in more detail by creating an ‘index’: THE TRUSTWORTHINESS INDEX. I have also provided a concrete example of a researcher who seems to be associated with a remarkably high index (the higher the index, the more suspicion of critical attitude).
Instead of unnecessarily upsetting my fellow researchers of alternative medicine any further, I will just issue this challenge: if any research group can demonstrate to have an index below 0.5 (which would mean the team has published twice as many negative conclusions as positive ones), I will gladly and publicly retract my suspicion that this group is “anywhere near critical enough”.
Much has been written on this blog about progress in the area of chiropractic practice and research. But where is the evidence for progress? I did a little search and one of the first sites I stumbled across was this one which is full to bursting with bogus claims. This cannot be what chiropractors call ‘progress’, I thought.
Determined to find real progress, I continued searching and found THE FOUNDATION FOR CHIROPRACTIC PROGRESS. Great, I thought, an organisation and a website entirely devoted to the very subject I was looking for. Consequently, I studied the information provided here in some detail. What follows are excerpts from the site:
Chiropractic care is a health option that has proven beneficial for a multitude of health conditions, along with in the practice of achieving optimal wellness. It is essential for those unaware of chiropractic care to be adequately informed, so they too can experience the benefits that over 60,000 practicing doctors of chiropractic in the U.S. provide to their patients daily. Established in 2003, the not-for-profit Foundation for Chiropractic Progress (F4CP) aims to educate the public about the many benefits associated with chiropractic care.On behalf of the F4CP, I invite you to tour this site and learn more about this effective form of treatment.
Kind regards,
Kent Greenawalt
Chairman | Foundation for Chiropractic Progress
THIS WAS A STRANGE INTRODUCTION, I THOUGHT; BUT UNDETERRED I READ ON:
Parents of Colicky Infants Turn to Chiropractic Care
For those parents who never imagined their ailing babies and toddlers could be helped by chiropractic care, it may be time for some rethinking.New mom Jean, a 31-year-old speech therapist from New Jersey, became an advocate after enlisting the help of her own chiropractor to treat her colicky infant girl, Emma. After having had what she says was “no luck” with the usual ways of alleviating colic symptoms – including giving Emma children’s probiotics daily – one appointment with board-certified in chiropractic pediatrics Dr. Lora Tanis produced an immediate difference.
Concussions Among Athletes
A concussion is a type of traumatic brain injury caused by a bump, blow or jolt to the head that can change the way the brain functions. Symptoms include dizziness, instability and confusion.
Using methods that rely on brain-based, non-invasive, drugfree approaches — like chiropractic
care and physical rehab — can help re-establish balance and maximal brain and nervous system functionality.
News of Health – Improving Military Health Care
Retired U.S. Army Brigadier General Becky Halstead—the first woman in U.S. history to command in combat at the strategic level—is speaking out on the value of chiropractic care for the nation’s military men and women.
Good Health
With the epidemic now estimated to be costing the nation $147 billion annually, it’s a question that’s very much on the minds of health experts. And many, including lifestyle guru Shea Vaughn, are citing chiropractic care as a crucial part of overall wellness programs.
FEELING A LITTLE DISAPPOINTED, I STOPPED READING AND THOUGHT
PROGRESS INDEED !!!
Homeopathy has many critics who claim that there is no good evidence for this type of therapy. Homeopaths invariably find this most unfair and point to a plethora of studies that show an effect. They are, of course, correct! There are plenty of trials that suggest that homeopathic remedies do work. The question, however, is HOW RELIABLE ARE THESE STUDIES?
Here is a brand new one which might stand for dozens of others.
In this study, homeopaths treated 50 multimorbid patients with homeopathic remedies identifies by a method called ‘polarity analysis’ (PA) and prospectively followed them over one year (PA enables homeopaths to calculate a relative healing probability, based on Boenninghausen’s grading of polar symptoms).
The 43 patients (86%) who completed the observation period experienced an average improvement of 91% in their initial symptoms. Six patients dropped out, and one did not achieve an improvement of 80%, and was therefore also counted as a treatment failure. The cost of homeopathic treatment was 41% of projected equivalent conventional treatment.
Good news then for enthusiasts of homeopathy? 91% improvement!
Yet, I am afraid that critics might not be bowled over. They might smell a whiff of selection bias, lament the lack of a control group or regret the absence of objective outcome measures. But I was prepared to go as far as stating that such results might be quite interesting… until I read the authors’ conclusions that is:
Polarity Analysis is an effective method for treating multimorbidity. The multitude of symptoms does not prevent the method from achieving good results. Homeopathy may be capable of taking over a considerable proportion of the treatment of multimorbid patients, at lower costs than conventional medicine.
Virtually nothing in these conclusions is based on the data provided. They are pure extrapolation and wild assumptions. Two questions seem to emerge from this:
- How on earth can we take this and so many other articles on homeopathy seriously?
- When does this sort of article cross the line between wishful thinking and scientific misconduct?
Yesterday, The Hinckley Times published a report on Parliament’s foremost medical expert which I take the liberty of reproducing below in a slightly shortened version.
Alternative therapy proponent David Tredinnick has pitched in with the possibility of complementary practitioners being the solution to the current A&E crisis. The Tory MP for Bosworth raised the issue with the Department of Health saying: “To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the potential contribution of regulated complementary and alternative medical practitioners to reducing demands on the NHS.” The question came against the backdrop of the nation’s casualty departments being swamped with new cases since Christmas.
Despite Mr Tredinnick’s pleas his faith in less mainstream medical care was not supported by Government health chiefs. In a written answer to the former Grenadier Guardsman, the Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Health, Daniel Poulter, said: “Practitioners of complementary and alternative medicines are not subject to statutory regulation. A working group has been established to consider a number of matters relating to the use of herbal and traditional medicines by practitioners. I know my hon. Friend is a member of this working group. “The findings of the working group will be published in due course, once it has finished its work. Until that working group has reported, no assessment can be made of the contribution of such practitioners to reducing demands on the National Health Service.”
Just days before in the House of Commons, Mr Tredinnick was apparently slapped down by a fellow Conservative MP and GP Sarah Wollaston when he called for a homeopathic flu vaccine to be given to people at risk this winter. Making the suggestion in his role as a member of the Health Select Committee he was rebuked by Mrs Wollaston, the chairman of the group, who distanced herself and said she would “personally be horrified” if his view was taken up.
Mr Tredinnick’s Liberal Democrat opponent councillor Michael Mullaney, said: “Dr Sarah Wollaston is a highly respected GP and Conservative MP whose background in the health service makes her someone who should be listened to on health issues. Unlike Mr Tredinnick, who has no formal medical training, yet constantly tries to tell doctors how to do their job. “If even Dr Wollaston, a fellow Conservative MP, is saying David Tredinnick is wrong and should be ignored, it is time he listened and stopped opening his mouth on things he knows nothing about. Mr Tredinnick has told doctors not to operate on a full moon and told GPs to use patients’ horoscopes when they come for consultations. With his way out views, Mr Tredinnick is increasingly becoming a joke even to his fellow Conservative MPs. How can he represent the people of Hinckley and Bosworth when even his own fellow Conservative MPs are condemning his views?”
Cllr Mullaney’s remarks relate to an episode in the Commons in October 2009 when Mr Tredinnick said blood didn’t clot when there was a full moon and more recently when the MP advocated the integration of astrology into the NHS.
I am deeply saddened by this unfair opposition to my friend Tredinnick. Finally, we have someone in Parliament who shows us a way out of the crisis and all we can do is to slap him down! Just think how much we could gain from his innovations:
- crystal healers and Reiki masters could take the pressure off A+E departments throughout the country;
- homeopathic vaccinations would protect us all from Ebola and other nasty infections;
- astrology could replace expensive screening programs which are of disputed value anyway.
I find it truly depressing to realise that we live in a time where great visionaries like Tredinnick are viciously belittled and their progressive messages ignored. We certainly do this at our very own peril! To me it is clear that none other than BIG PHARMA is behind this deplorable development.
I for one urge the good citizens of Bosworth to continue voting for this genius, and I vow to plead with the next prime minister to make Tredinnick secretary of health – this shrewd move would significantly strengthen the Tory’s effort to save out National Health Service for the benefit of us all.
Few subjects lead to such heated debate as the risk of stroke after chiropractic manipulations (if you think this is an exaggeration, look at the comment sections of previous posts on this subject). Almost invariably, one comes to the conclusion that more evidence would be helpful for arriving at firmer conclusions. Before this background, this new publication by researchers (mostly chiropractors) from the US ‘Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice’ is noteworthy.
The purpose of this study was to quantify the risk of stroke after chiropractic spinal manipulation, as compared to evaluation by a primary care physician, for Medicare beneficiaries aged 66 to 99 years with neck pain.
The researchers conducted a retrospective cohort analysis of a 100% sample of annualized Medicare claims data on 1 157 475 beneficiaries aged 66 to 99 years with an office visit to either a chiropractor or to a primary care physician for neck pain. They compared hazard of vertebrobasilar stroke and any stroke at 7 and 30 days after office visit using a Cox proportional hazards model. We used direct adjusted survival curves to estimate cumulative probability of stroke up to 30 days for the 2 cohorts.
The findings indicate that the proportion of subjects with a stroke of any type in the chiropractic cohort was 1.2 per 1000 at 7 days and 5.1 per 1000 at 30 days. In the primary care cohort, the proportion of subjects with a stroke of any type was 1.4 per 1000 at 7 days and 2.8 per 1000 at 30 days. In the chiropractic cohort, the adjusted risk of stroke was significantly lower at 7 days as compared to the primary care cohort (hazard ratio, 0.39; 95% confidence interval, 0.33-0.45), but at 30 days, a slight elevation in risk was observed for the chiropractic cohort (hazard ratio, 1.10; 95% confidence interval, 1.01-1.19).
The authors conclude that, among Medicare B beneficiaries aged 66 to 99 years with neck pain, incidence of vertebrobasilar stroke was extremely low. Small differences in risk between patients who saw a chiropractor and those who saw a primary care physician are probably not clinically significant.
I do, of course, applaud any new evidence on this rather ‘hot’ topic – but is it just me, or are the above conclusions a bit odd? Five strokes per 1000 patients is definitely not “extremely low” in my book; and furthermore I do wonder whether all experts would agree that a doubling of risk at 30 days in the chiropractic cohort is “probably not clinically significant” – particularly, if we consider that chiropractic spinal manipulation has so very little proven benefit.
My message to (chiropractic) researchers is simple: PLEASE REMEMBER THAT SCIENCE IS NOT A TOOL FOR CONFIRMING BUT FOR TESTING HYPOTHESES.
During the next few weeks, I will post several short excerpts from my new book ‘A SCIENTIST IN WONDERLAND‘. Its subtitle already discloses much of what it is all about: ‘A MEMOIRE OF SEARCHING THE TRUTH AND FINDING TROUBLE’.
Some of my critics are likely to claim that I engage in this form of ‘promotion’ because I want to maximise my income by enticing my readers to buy the book. This is partly true, of course: after having worked very hard on this book for about 5 years, I want it to be read (but, at the same time, my critics would be mistaken: I do not expect to get rich on my new book – I am not that naïve; this ‘memoire’ will never be found in any best-seller list, I am sure). So, I suggest (if you do not want me to profit in any way) that you read my memoire after you got it from your library (which obviously would not affect my cash-flow all that much).
So here it is: with much trepidation and even more excitement I present to you the very first, short excerpt (as I said, there will be more).
Prelude
There are some people, a fortunate few, who seem to know from an early age where they want to go in life, and have no trouble getting there.
I was not one of them. I was born in Germany in the years immediately following the end of World War II and, like many German children of that era, I was acutely aware of the awkwardness and unease that my elders displayed when it came to discussions that touched on the country’s recent history. Even as a young boy, I was conscious that there was a large and restive skeleton in the nation’s closet, and that it belonged to all of us – even to those of us who had not been alive during the Nazi era were somehow nevertheless its legatees, inextricably bound to it simply by the awareness of its existence.
With time, the growing realization that so many of our peers – teachers, uncles, aunts; perhaps even our own parents – had lent their assent, or worse, their enthusiastic assistance to the Nazi regime robbed their generation of its moral authority and left us, their children, unmoored and adrift.
In a profound sense I felt homeless. An accident of fate had landed me on the planet with a German passport, and with German as my mother tongue, but where did I really belong? Where would I go? What would I do with my life?
There had been physicians in my family for generations and there was always an expectation that I, too, would enter that profession. Yet I felt no strong pull towards medicine. As a young man my only real passion was music, particularly jazz, with its anarchic improvisations and disobedient rhythms; and the fact that it had been banned by the Nazis only made it all the more appealing to me. I would have been perfectly happy to linger indefinitely in the world of music, but eventually, like a debt come due, medicine summoned me, and I surrendered myself to the profession of my forebears.
In hindsight I am glad that my mother nudged me gently yet insistently in the direction of medical school. While music has delighted and comforted me throughout my life, it has been medicine that has truly defined me, stretching, challenging and nourishing me intellectually, even as it tested me on a personal level almost to the limits of my endurance.
Certainly, I had never anticipated that asking basic and necessary questions as a scientist might prove so fiercely controversial, and that as a result of my research I might become involved in ideological wrangling and political intrigue emanating from the highest level.
If I had known the difficulties I would face, the stark choices, the conflicts and machinations that awaited me, would I have chosen to spend my life in medicine? Yes, I would. Becoming a physician and pursuing the career of a scientist has afforded me not only the opportunity to speak out against the dangerous and growing influence of pseudoscience in medicine, but also, paradoxically, has given me both the reason and the courage to look back steadily at the unbearable past.
This is the story of how I finally found where I belong.
Guest post by Louise Lubetkin
(A SCIENTIST IN WONDERLAND: A MEMOIRE OF SEARCHING FOR TRUTH AND FINDING TROUBLE has now been published. An apt opportunity perhaps to post a letter and comment from the person who helped me GREATLY in finishing it.)
People write memoirs for a variety of reasons but perhaps one of the strongest impelling forces is the need to make sense of one’s own experiences. It is not surprising that you, who spent your entire professional career searching for explanations, identifying associations and parsing correlations, found yourself looking at your own life with the same analytical curiosity. Memoir is in many respects a natural choice in this regard.
That you chose to undertake a profoundly personal inventory at this juncture is also understandable in human terms. Retirement, whether anticipated and planned for, or (as in your case) thrust rudely upon you, reorders one’s sense of identity in ways that cannot fail to prompt reflection. It would have been surprising had you not felt an urge to look back and take stock, to trace the narrative arc of your life from its beginnings in post-war Germany all the way to the quiet house in rural Suffolk where you now sit, surrounded by the comfort of books and the accumulated paraphernalia of a life spent digging and delving in search of the building blocks of truth.
Given the contentious circumstances surrounding your departure from academic life, it is quite likely that you will be asked whether your decision to write a memoir was driven, at least in part, by a desire to settle scores. I think you can dismiss such a question unhesitatingly. You have no scores to settle: you came to England after a steady and unbroken ascent to the apex of your professional career, voluntarily leaving behind a position that most people would regard with envy and deference. You were never a supplicant at Exeter’s door; far from it. The fact that things went inexorably downhill over the course of your 20 years’ tenure there, and ended so deplorably, is not a reflection on you, your department, or the quality or quantity of work you turned out. Rather, it is a reflection on the very nature of the work you went there to do – and if there is any message in your memoir, it is this:
Alternative medicine is not, at its heart, a logical enterprise, and its adherents are not committed to – nor even interested in – a rational evaluation of their methods. Rather, alternative medicine is primarily an ideological position, a political credo, a reaction against mainstream medicine. To many of its adherents and impassioned advocates, its appeal lies not in any demonstrable therapeutic efficacy but in its perceived outsider status as the countercultural medicine, the medicine for Everyman, the David to the bullying medical-pharmaceutical Goliath. That your research work would elicit howls of protest was perhaps inevitable, given the threat it posed to the profitable and powerful alternative medicine industry. But it didn’t stop there: astonishingly, your work drew the ire of none less than the meddlesome heir apparent to the British throne. Prince Charles’ attempts to stymie your work call to mind the twelfth century martyr Thomas à Becket, of whom Henry II reputedly cried: “Oh, who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” (Henry’s sycophantic henchmen were quick to oblige, dispatching the hapless cleric on the steps of Canterbury cathedral.)
It’s clear that you were acutely aware, as a young man growing up in Germany, that science was not immune to the corrupting influence of political ideology, and that the German medical profession had entered – enthusiastically – into a Faustian compact with the Nazi regime. You have exhibited a courageous insistence on confronting and examining a national past that has at times felt like an intensely personal burden to you. It is ironic that in going to sleepy Exeter in an earnest, conscious attempt to shake off the constricting, intrigue-ridden atmosphere of academic Vienna, you ultimately found yourself once again mired in a struggle against the influence of ideology and the manipulation of science for political ends.
You went to Exeter strictly as a scientist, a skilled inquirer, a methodical investigator, expecting to be able to bring the rigors of logic and the scientific method to bear on an area of medical practice that had until then not been subjected to any kind of systematic evaluation. Instead, you were caught in a maelstrom of intrigue far worse than that which you had gratefully left behind in Vienna, buffeted and bruised by forces against which a lesser man would surely not have had the fortitude to push back so long and so hard.
