Analysis · The Monarch and Alternative Medicine · 1982–2026

The King and the Remedies: Charles III's Forty Years of Promoting Alternative Medicine

Before he was King of Canada, Charles spent four decades championing homeopathy and “integrated health” — founding a charity, lobbying ministers, selling a detox tincture, and urging the World Health Assembly to bring alternative medicine into health systems. In 2004 a leading cancer surgeon wrote him an open letter in the BMJ: with respect, sir, you've got it wrong. Here is what has happened since.

By Terry Polevoy, MD · QuackeryWatch.com · Rebuilt from this site's 2004 cancer archive, October 2026

The record at a glance

Foundation: The Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health, 1993–2010. Closed after its finance director stole £253,000; he was jailed for three years.
Advocacy: The 2005 Smallwood report on putting complementary therapies in the NHS; a 2006 speech to the World Health Assembly; letters lobbying government ministers.
Products: Duchy Originals “Detox Tincture”, 2009: its advertising was ruled misleading by the UK Advertising Standards Authority.
As King: Patron of the Faculty of Homeopathy (from 2019) and of the College of Medicine and Integrated Health. In 2023 appointed Dr. Michael Dixon, a long-time advocate of integrated medicine, head of the royal medical household.
In Canada: Canada's head of state. Ontario still regulates homeopathy as a health profession.

His case, in his own terms

Charles has never said homeopathy should replace modern medicine. His argument, made consistently since he addressed the British Medical Association as its president in 1982, is that medicine has become too narrowly focused on disease and technology; that patients are whole people whose wellbeing, beliefs and circumstances matter; that many already use complementary therapies and should be able to do so safely and openly; and that “integration” — the best of conventional and complementary care together — would serve them better. His foundation's stated aim was to explore how safe, proven complementary therapies could work alongside mainstream medicine.

Many doctors share the first part of that argument. The disagreement is over the second: whether therapies with no demonstrated effect beyond placebo belong in a health system at all, and whether a royal patron's endorsement leads patients to treat them as equivalent to medicine that works.

“With respect, your highness, you've got it wrong”

In June 2004 British newspapers reported the Prince speaking warmly of coffee enemas and carrot juice in connection with cancer, referring to the Gerson regimen. On 10 July 2004 Michael Baum, professor emeritus of surgery at University College London and one of Britain's leading breast-cancer specialists, published an open letter to him in the BMJ.

Baum wrote that he had treated thousands of cancer patients over forty years and lost friends and relatives to the disease. He had time, he said, for complementary approaches that improved quality of life or gave spiritual comfort when properly integrated with modern medicine, but none for “alternative” therapies that placed themselves above the evidence. And he pointed out the difference in their standing: his authority came from decades of study and research; the Prince's from an accident of birth.

The record since 2004

2005
The Prince commissioned the Smallwood report, which argued that complementary therapies, homeopathy among them, could save the NHS money. Professor Edzard Ernst of Exeter, the first professor of complementary medicine, withdrew his name from it and publicly criticized it. The Prince's private secretary complained to Exeter University that Ernst had breached confidentiality; the university cleared him.
May 2006
At the World Health Assembly in Geneva, the Prince urged health ministers to plan for integrating conventional and alternative medicine.
2009
Duchy Originals, his food company, marketed Echina-Relief, Hyperi-Lift and a “Detox Tincture” of artichoke and dandelion. The Advertising Standards Authority found the email promoting them misleading. Ernst called the detox product outright quackery.
2009
Reports that the Prince had lobbied the health secretary on complementary medicine. Letters from him to ministers — the so-called “black spider memos” — were later released after a long legal fight.
April 2010
Police opened a fraud inquiry at the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health; two former officials were arrested and the charity announced its closure on 30 April. Its finance director, George Gray, was convicted of stealing £253,000 and sentenced to three years. Later that year many of the same people founded the College of Medicine, which critics in the BMJ called the foundation under a new name; the College disputed that.
2018
Asked in a BBC documentary whether his public campaigning would continue once he was king, he said it would not, adding that he was not that stupid.
2019
Became royal patron of the Faculty of Homeopathy, and later patron of the College of Medicine and Integrated Health.
2023
Appointed Dr. Michael Dixon, a general practitioner and long-standing advocate of integrated medicine, as head of the royal medical household. The same year one of his charities returned £110,000 to the Government of India that had been earmarked for an Ayurvedic centre in the NHS that never opened.

Since becoming King in September 2022 he has been far less outspoken. The patronages have remained.

What the evidence says. Homeopathy is the clearest test of “integration”, because it is the therapy he has supported longest. Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council reviewed the evidence in 2015 and found no health condition for which homeopathy was effective. England's NHS stopped funding it in 2017 on the same basis. A therapy that does not work cannot be made safe by integrating it; it can only be made more convincing.

Why it matters in Canada

Charles III is King of Canada. He does not set Canadian health policy, and nothing he does as a private patron binds any Canadian government. But a monarch's patronage is a kind of endorsement that no other advocate can buy, and it is used: homeopathic and integrative organizations cite royal support in their own promotion.

Ontario is one of very few places in the world that regulates homeopathy as a health profession, through the College of Homeopaths of Ontario under the Homeopathy Act, 2007; the provincial cabinet was still making appointments to its council in 2026. Regulation is meant to protect the public, but it also lends a profession the appearance of a scientific basis. In February 2024 the Palace announced the King's cancer diagnosis. There is no reliable evidence that he has been treated with anything other than conventional medicine, and this page makes no suggestion otherwise.

Related on QuackeryWatch

Sources

Michael Baum. “An open letter to the Prince of Wales: with respect, your highness, you've got it wrong.” BMJ 2004;329:118 (10 July 2004).
“The Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health,” Wikipedia, and its sources: The Guardian, 26 and 30 April 2010; BBC News, 30 April 2010; Evening Standard, 20 August 2010; BMJ, June–July 2011.
Edzard Ernst. “Is King Charles treating his cancer with homeopathy?” The Skeptic, August 2025; and blog post of 18 October 2025.
Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst. Trick or Treatment: Alternative Medicine on Trial. 2008.
National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia). Statement on homeopathy, 2015.
Government of Ontario. Order in Council 1052/2026 (College of Homeopaths of Ontario council), July 2026.

This page reports the public record of the King's advocacy and patronages; it makes no claim about his private health care. Corrections are welcome and are recorded on the page.