The Guardian’s health editor Sarah Boseley announced yesterday “We need this voice to fight quackery”
Apparently celebrity professor, Edzard Ernst is in danger of losing his job as the only professor of complementary medicine. Sarah Boseley laments the fact that there are not many job opportunities for former medical doctors who dabbled in complementary medicine. Ernst seems to think Prince Charles does not like him and there may be a conspiracy behind him loosing his job.
Boseley tells us “homeopaths and their friends at Buckingham Palace must be rubbing their hands. The scourge of complementary medicine, Professor Edzard Ernst, may be facing the closure of his unit at the Peninsula medical school in Exeter. While there is plenty of money in alternative therapies, the funding to allow Ernst to test them scientifically is running out .
Ernst smells a royal rat, of course. An unusually outspoken scientist, he has never made a secret of his issues with Prince Charles’s Foundation for Integrated Health, which last week he labelled a "lobby group for unproven treatments". He believes he has become "persona non grata" with Exeter since Sir Michael Peat, the Prince’s private secretary, wrote to complain that he had publicly criticised a report he had been shown in confidence. The university cleared him, but Ernst suspects they would still like to see him go. The university argues that it is just hard to raise money for such studies”.
If he is such a fantastic “evidence based” scientist surely the NHS or the pharmaceutical industry will snap him up? I suspect that is not going to happen otherwise the Guardian would not be appealing to the CAM industry to fund his research “in fighting quackery” His CV may appeal to the GCC and BCA who have recently announced they also want to fight quackery. Professor Ernst has presented his finding to the GCC and members have much in common with him and his views of chiropractic. Margaret Coats and Peter Dixon would welcome him with open arms, stranger things have happened.
