Prince Charles, heir to the English throne, has long been a big supporter of alternative medicines and other non-scientific medical treatments. Now, however, a leading breast cancer surgeon is taking him to task for abusing the authority of his station by spreading hope over pseudoscience.

  Celia Hall writes in Telegraph: Prof Baum, who is also visiting professor of medical humanities at UCL, says today in the British Medical Journal that the

Prince's reported support for Gerson therapy and more recently for coffee enemas and carrot juice cures are ill-advised. n an open letter to Prince Charles he says: "Over the past 20 years I have treated thousands of patients with cancer and lost some dear friends and relatives to this dreaded disease.

"The power of my authority comes with knowledge built on 40 years of study and 25 years of active involvement in cancer research. Your power and authority rest on an accident of birth. I don't begrudge you that authority but I do beg you to exercise your power with extreme caution when advising patients with life-threatening diseases to embrace unproven therapies.

Prof Baum, who is lecturing in Australia, said yesterday that it was hard to judge how many people might have stopped taking medical cancer treatment in favour of alternative therapy in response to Prince Charles's support. He said research had shown that more was spent on alternative cancer therapies than on medical treatment. "That is an awful lot of money changing hands. If it went into medical research perhaps we could move forward faster. ... There is this peculiar idea of a conspiracy in orthodox medicine that doctors want to deny their patients effective treatment. I don't know of any doctor who would not use a treatment that worked."

It’s almost sickening to see someone with as much power and influence as Prince Charles misuse and abuse it by encouraging people not to seek help via science, but instead via pseudoscience that will likely only lead to faster deaths. He could do a lot of good by throwing his weight behind real scientific efforts to cure cancers but in the end all he does is retard progress by diverting funds and attention to nonsensical treatments. He might as well tell people to just sit at home and pray rather than go to a doctor.

Read More:

• Skepticism & Critical Thinking
• News About Skepticism and the Paranormal
• Alternative Medicine & Faith Healing