To coincide with his 60th birthday, Prince Charles – a.k.a. the Prince of Counterknowledge – took the opportunity to make an important announcement via his friend and biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby. When Charles is made King, wrote Dimbleby in the Sunday Times, he will continue to speak out on public issues:
Although it is not yet a subject for open, let alone formal, discussion, there are discreet moves afoot to redefine the future role of the sovereign so that it would allow King Charles III to speak out on matters of national and international importance in ways that at the moment would be unthinkable. For the time being, this is just a murmuring between Clarence House and Buckingham Palace that has also reached the corridors of Westminster and Whitehall. But it whispers a heretical thought: that tomorrow’s monarchy may need to be more “active”, more engaged, more intimately in touch with the concerns of the British people as we move into ever more testing times.
This is grave news indeed. Outspoken monarchs are considered “unthinkable” for a reason and, although he might think he is “in touch with the concerns of the British people”, Prince Charles is one royal who only adds weight to the idea of a vow of monarchical silence. You don’t have to be Republican to see Johann Hari’s point in yesterday’s Independent:
If not for that fortuitous journey through a royal womb, Charles Windsor’s “wise” arguments would be gathering dust in the reject bin at certain newspapers’ letters pages. If his advocates didn’t keep praising him as “a public intellectual” I wouldn’t be rude enough to point it out, but Charles Windsor is a strikingly stupid man. Every time he has been put into a competitive situation where he is judged according to objective criteria, he has been a disaster.
Despite the most expensive education money can buy, he managed only to scrape a B and a C in his A-Levels. Despite this, he was admitted to Cambridge University, where he failed again, barely scraping a 2:2. When he was ushered into the Navy, he was so inept at navigation he kept crashing. Anybody else would have been court-martialled, but instead the Navy gave him one-on-one tuition for years. And still he failed.
And what of his arguments? They are garbled, uninformed, cliché-ridden repetitions of what the last person who spoke to him said. His very sympathetic biographer Dimbleby admits that his staff “were uncomfortable with his tendency to reach instant conclusions on the basis of insufficient thought”.
The Prince’s staff are right to feel uncomfortable with his “insufficient thought”. Although His Royal Highness likes to joke that his “meddling” upsets the establishment – that, in his own words, he is a “blinding nuisance” – it actually does real damage. Let’s remind ourselves of two of his ongoing campaigns:
- GM Crops: In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in August this year, Prince Charles claimed that, contrary to all scientific evidence, relying on big corporations for food would make for “the absolute destruction of everything… and the classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future.” He added: “And if they think its somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time.”
- Homeopathy and alternative medicine: In 2005, a report commissioned by Prince Charles called for complementary therapies – including osteopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, homeopathy and herbal medicine – to be given a greater role in the NHS, particularly so that those in “low income families” and people living in “poorer areas” could benefit.
Prince Charles, we know, has it wrong about GM crops. And, as Ben Goldacre of Bad Science recently wrote in The Lancet, “five large meta-analyses of homoeopathy trials have been done. All have had the same result: after excluding methodologically inadequate trials and accounting for publication bias, homoeopathy produced no statistically significant benefit over placebo.” The same goes for the other “medicines” – there is no scientific evidence to suggest they work better than placebo.
So why should we be worried? As a leader column in the Observer commented last year: “Charles takes full advantage of his privileged position: he summons officials for secret meetings; his letters are fast-tracked to ministerial red boxes.” Anyone who saw the BBC documentary Charles at 60: the Passionate Prince will know he is a focused, active and serious man – he networks constantly with the leaders of the business world, top politicians and the most senior civil servants. And, by using what he terms his “convening power” to bring them together, he creates opportunities to influence not only their opinions but also, indirectly, official policy.
Doing this as the Prince of Wales is at the very least ethically questionable (we don’t even know the whole story – Counterknowledge.com cannot request to see Charles’s correspondence, no matter what the broader implications might be, because the Freedom of Information Act exempts royal households as they are not “public authorities”). But if Prince Charles continues to “speak out” when he is made King – especially given the nature of his favourite issues – he could provoke a constitutional crisis. Follow the Queen’s advice, Charles, and keep mum: Kingly dictates would be a phenomenally bad idea.
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9 responses
Good for prince Charles…He has bene proven right. But as any one can tell, the only people who stand to benefit from GM and are pushing it are the corporations like the sinister Monsanto and scientists who developed GM.
AND as for Homeopathy:
Two New Studies Find Anti-Homeopathy Review Wrong
by Sherry Baker (see all articles by this author)
(NaturalNews) In August of 2005, the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet published a review comparing clinical trials of homeopathy with trials of conventional medicine. The conclusion of this study, which was widely hailed as evidence that homeopathy is worthless quackery, stated that homeopathic medicines are non-effective and, at best, just placebos. What’s more, an accompanying editorial in the Lancet said this “evidence” should close the door on the non-toxic, alternative treatment method, and flatly proclaimed this review should mark “the end of homeopathy”. Now two newly published studies, one in the journal Homeopathy and the other in the mainstream medical Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, have both gone on record to say the Lancet review was enormously flawed and downright inaccurate. Instead of showing homeopathy doesn’t work, the conclusion should have been that, at least for some ailments, it is effective.
Homeopathy involves giving very small doses of substances called remedies that, according to homeopathy, would produce the same or similar symptoms of illness in healthy people if they were given in larger doses. The goal of homeopathy is to stimulate the body’s defense system in order to prevent or treat illness. Homeopathy treatment is tailored to each individual and homeopathic practitioners work to select remedies according to a total picture of the patient, including not only symptoms but lifestyle, emotional and mental states, and other factors.
The original claim made in the Lancet review that homeopathic medicines are worthless treatments (other than being placebos) was based on six clinical trials of conventional medicine and eight studies of homeopathy. But what trials, exactly, were studied? It turns out the Lancet did not reveal this most basic information and, as the new studies point out, seriously flawed assumptions were made about the data that was presented. There are a limited number of homeopathic studies so it is not difficult to pick and choose facts to interpret selectively and unfavorably, which appears to be just what was done in the original Lancet anti-homeopathy article.
Bottom line: the Lancet’s report showing homeopathy is worthless lacked the academic care and scientific approach called for in medical journals. In fact, it could well be seen as a hack job.
In a statement to the press, George Lewith, Professor of Health Research at Southampton University in Great Britain, stated: “The review gave no indication of which trials were analyzed nor of the various vital assumptions made about the data. This is not usual scientific practice. If we presume that homeopathy works for some conditions but not others, or change the definition of a ‘larger trial’, the conclusions change. This indicates a fundamental weakness in the conclusions: they are NOT reliable.”
The two recently published scientific papers that investigated the previous Lancet review conclude that an analysis of all high quality trials of homeopathy show positive outcomes. What’s more, the eight larger and higher quality trials of homeopathy looked at a variety of medical conditions. The new studies point out that because homeopathy worked consistently for some of these ailments and not others, the results must indicate that homeopathic remedies can’t be simply placebos. In addition, the studies conclude that comparing homeopathy to conventional medicine was a meaningless apples-and-oranges approach. There are also concerns that the original anti-homeopathy review used unpublished criteria. For example, the researchers didn’t bother to define what they meant by “higher quality” homeopathy research.
The new studies not only cast serious doubts on the original Lancet review, which was headed by Professor Matthias Egger of the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Berne, but they strongly indicate Egger and his team based their conclusions on a series of hidden judgments that were prejudiced against homeopathy. So far,Professor Egger has declined to comment on the findings of the new studies in Homeopathy and the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology,
A press statement from the National Center for Homeopathy explains that an open assessment of the current evidence suggests that homeopathy is probably effective for many conditions including allergies, upper respiratory tract infections and flu, but agrees that much more research is needed. To that end, the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has announced it is currently supporting research in these areas:
* Homeopathy for physical, mental, and emotional symptoms of fibromyalgia (a chronic disorder involving widespread musculoskeletal pain, multiple tender points on the body, and fatigue).
* Homeopathy to help relieve or prevent brain deterioration and damage in stroke and dementia.
* Homeopathy (specifically the remedy cadmium) to potentially prevent damage to the cells of the prostate when those cells are exposed to toxins.
http://www.naturalnews.com/024852.html
Change the genetic structure of the food you eat and you change your OWN cell health. Longitudinal studies (over many years) have not been performed on GE crop seeds because agritech is expensive business and having a patent prior to contaminating farms creates a monopoly when seed patents come into play. I’m surprised to hear the Prince of Wales uttering such words about destruction. Perhaps he is aware of the Ark project. Why do we need such a thing? Perhaps there is growing concern by some of the elites surrounding the monopolisation and how it will work in with Codex Alimentarius.
Not sure about homeopathic treatments, but if you’re made of water and you treat yourself with water…I guess it must have some benefit - if only on a mind-over-matter basis. Good nutrition is key to maintaining good health and yes, sometimes vitamins can help, but unlike modern medicine which often treats the symptom rather than the cause (and makes a few people richer in the process), vitamins and minerals are meant to treat a cause, not just a symptom.
Interesting article and I really hope that Charles follows his mum’s example and doesn’t do himself out of a job by publicly expressing his views in his role as monarch.
In a separate but related point, does anyone else have a problem dealing with the consequences of the placebo effect ? People that are close to me get succour from homeopathy but obviously if I were to point out the counter knowledge of this belief I would be removing the benefit of the placebo effect that they gain. A bit of a bind and I would like to know how the blogasphere handle what must be a common problem ?
Interesting to see anti-GE sentiments going hand-in-hand with pro-homeopathy beliefs. Not just in his ‘highness’ but in some of the commenters here. I guess water must help, eh?
Disseminate, you may be happy with medicine in the Dark Ages, but I’m afraid I want mine to work.
Brian…you get all the proven scientific evidence you can find for homeopathy working and I will get all the proven evidence I can find on it not working and we’ll see who has the much bigger pile.
Meanwhile people will continue to die and suffer based on the deciets and half-truths pushed by people like yourself.
And as for your dig at the Lancet; if it is so easy to fool with bad science then I am surprised someone like you isn’t published in it constantly
In Response to Innoculated Mind’s comment: “Disseminate, you may be happy with medicine in the Dark Ages, but I’m afraid I want mine to work.”
Where does modern medicine originate from? Much of it is synthesised from naturally occurring extracts. Your comment seems to imply I am anti-prescription medicines. I am open to options. Some drugs do help, but they tend to treat the symptom and not the cause. Nutrition and vitamins seeks to help your body naturally. How do we engineer a crop in the lab? Insert something and change the structure. I want the option to choose whether to eat it or not. How will this affect those with allergies if the labelling of GE crops eventually becomes removed or it becomes impossible to know for sure whether the ingredients of a product contains lab-based genetically engineered crops?
Whatever anyone takes for a condition they want it to work (in reference to medicines, be it ‘natural’ or pharmaceuticals). Why bother taking them otherwise? I’ve experienced both sides of the coin and still utilise both but am wary of a doctor or any human being who would strictly state one or the other. Some of the old remedies help. Try consuming vinegar for a sore throat, instead of sucking on a lozenge. Which is more likely to kill the bugs and which is likely to simply utilise your own saliva to try and bring relief to a hot and inflamed throat but drag the pain out for days on end? (Sure, one tastes better, but one is also more expensive…funny that.) Sucking on a boiled sweet would have the same result as a throat lozenge.
Prince Charles has been proven right. But for me only the scientist can benefit the GM..
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