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Hot off the press The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health (FIH) has been spreading misinformation about medicine since 1993. It has featured often on this blog. Now it has closed its doors.

An announcement has appeared on the FIH website

30 April 2010 The Trustees of The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health have decided to close the charity.

The announcement goes on

"Whilst the closure has been planned for many months and is part of an agreed strategy, the Trustees have brought forward the closure timetable as a result of a fraud investigation at the charity." "The Trustees feel that The Foundation has achieved its key objective of promoting the use of integrated health. Since The Foundation was set up in 1993, integrated health has become part of the mainstream healthcare agenda, with over half a million patients using complementary therapies each year, alongside conventional medicine. . . "

While the immediate precipitating cause may have been the fraud (see below), the idea that the Foundation "has achieved its key objective of promoting the use of integrated health" seems like a ludicrous bit of make-believe. Well, make-believe is something with which the Foundation was quite familiar. At a time when university courses in quackery are vanishing like the snow in springtime, they can hardly believe that their aims have been achieved. But I guess one could not expect them to say "sorry folks, we were wrong all along".

The 2010 Conference is cancelled too

Judging by the quality of the 2009 conference, which I analysed at length last year, the cancellation of the 2010 conference is very welcome news (except perhaps to a few sycophants looking for honours).

What next? A College?

The rumour is that a “College of Integrated Medicine” may arise from the ashes of FIH. Or even, heaven forbid. a Royal College of Integrated baloney. Since universities seem to be deciding that it isn’t sensible to teach myth as truth, i is not unlikely.

“Prince Charles’s aide at homeopathy charity arrested on suspicion of fraud“

This headline, of an article in the Guardian, by Robert Booth, was not entirely unexpected.

The parlous state of the accounts at the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health has been documented already at

Gimpy’s blog.

“An aide in Prince Charles’s campaign for wider use of complementary medicine in the NHS was arrested at dawn today on suspicion of fraud and money-laundering at the prince’s health charity. A 49-year old man, understood to be a former senior official at the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health, was taken into custody at a police station in north London. He was arrested alongside a 54-year-old woman, who was being held at the same address. The arrests follow a police investigation into £300,000 unaccounted for in the books of the charity, of which the Prince is president.”

More news will appear here, as it comes in.

Follow-up

Other posts on this topic appeared rapidly.

The Guardian 30 April. Robert Booth Prince of Wales’s health charity wound up in wake of fraud investigation

Dr Aust’s Spleen 30 April In memoriam. In which Dr Aust gets a bit poetic

Quackometer 30 April. Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health Closes. Prince Charles’ Toad Eaters are no more.

Followed by the rest of the mainstream media.

Edzard Ernst 1 May 2010, in the Indepenndent. Better than any journalist. Why alternative medicine wins from the foundation’s demise. Read it! Here are some quotations.

“I therefore think that the FIH has become a lobby group for unproven and disproven treatments populated by sycophants.” “The FIH has repeatedly been economical with the truth. For instance when it published a DoH-sponsored patient guide that was devoid of evidence. They claimed evidence was never meant to be included. But I had seen a draft where it was and friends have seen the contract with the DoH where “evidence” was an important element. “ “I hope that, after the demise of FIH, the discussion about alternative medicine in the UK can once more become rational. I also hope that Prince Charles has the greatness of selecting advisers who actually advise rather than “Yes Men” who are hoping to see their names on the next Honours List. “

1 May 2010. According to Martin Delgado, in the Daily Mail, the people who were arrested on suspicion of fraud were accountant George Gray and his wife. Gray was Finance Director and acting Chief Executive of FIH. About as senior as you can get.

Gray spent two weeks (two weeks?) at Diabetes UK in 2004 before becoming finance director at the Leadership Foundation For Higher Education.