The British Royal Household has its own team of medics, who look after the health of the Royal family. They are led by a position titled ‘Head of the Royal Medical Household’. Previously this post was held by the eminent Prof Sir Huw Thomas, consultant at King Edward VII’s hospital and St Mary’s hospital in London, as well as professor of gastrointestinal genetics at Imperial College London. However, now that Charles has taken charge, he has appointed a new man: Dr. Michael Dixon.
Dr. Dixon is a retired general practitioner whom I know well. When I started my research at the University of Exeter 30 years ago, we collaborated on several projects. I am not the only one to be familiar with Dr Dixon – because of his notoriously fallacious thinking, the US skeptic Steven Novella once called him a ‘pyromaniac in a field of (integrative) straw men’.
Before the new appointment, Dixon had been a ‘Medical Advisor to The Prince of Wales’ for the last 20 years. What binds the two together is their enthusiasm of so-called alternative medicine. Charles has his whole adult life promoted particularly those alternative health modalities that most overtly fly in the face of science, and it seems to me that Dixon has somewhat followed in those footsteps the best he can.
In 1998, for instance, Dixon published a study in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, analysing the effectiveness of spiritual healing, in which he concluded that the laying on of hands:
“may be an effective adjunct for the treatment of chronically ill patients presenting in general practice.”
After he became Charles’ advisor, he was appointed as medical director of ‘The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health’. This was the organization which had to close in 2010 admits allegations of fraud and money laundering – allegations which saw its finance director go to prison for three years. Following its demise, the foundation quickly morphed into the ‘The College of Medicine and Integrated Health’, of which Charles is a patron and Dixon the chair.
The college is highly active in promoting various types of complementary and alternative medicine, including those that are both implausible and unproven such as ‘Neurolinguistic Programming’, ‘Thought Field Therapy’, homeopathy and Reiki.
Charles once famously said that he is proud to be an enemy of the enlightenment but he also insisted that he would stop his lobbying for unproven or disproven health interventions once he had ascended the throne. The UK scientific community had been wondering whether he would be able to keep this promise. The appointment of Michael Dixon as ‘Head of the Royal Medical Household’ was discrete, and went unnoticed by the UK press. It does perhaps, however, go some way towards answering the question as to whether Charles can control his ambitions to advocate for ineffective treatments.
Could it be that, rather than pursuing his anti-science agenda himself, he will now delegate it to those long-term allies who he has appointed to positions of influence?
