Charles, the Alternative Prince: An Unauthorized Biography. By Edzard Ernst. Exeter, United Kingdom: Imprint Academic (Societas), 2022. ISBN 978-1788360708. 210 pp. Softcover, $29.90; kindle, $15.99.

The title of the latest book by Edzard Ernst is somewhat misleading. Though certainly unauthorized, this is not a standard biography. Rather, it is a searing, ruthlessly efficient account of one aspect of Prince Charles’s life: his decades-long uncritical, misguided promotion of unproven and unscientific alternative medicine.

Ernst, the former chair of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter, is the perfect person to guide us through the almost endless labyrinth of nonsense in which the Prince of Wales has wandered. Ernst and a team of twenty researchers vigorously investigated all aspects of alternative medicine and published more papers on the subject than any research laboratory in the world. Though Ernst began as an optimist about the potential of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), including herbalism, chiropractic, and traditional Chinese medicine, study after study demonstrated that CAM failed in terms of both safety and efficacy. In short, almost none of it worked—and a lot of it was potentially dangerous. Their findings eventually put Ernst and his team in direct conflict with the prince, when Charles’s principal private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, filed a letter of complaint about Ernst that led to a year-long investigation. Ernst was cleared of any wrongdoing, but shortly thereafter his funding dried up and the lab was closed, sending him into early retirement. 

Despite this, Ernst’s brisk, clear book does not read like a vendetta; rather, is it an accessible dissection of the prince’s misguided promotion of homeopathy, iridology, reflexology, Reiki, and just about everything else in between. In short, readable chapters, Ernst unblinkingly presents how Charles has written books and articles promoting alternative medicine and spearheaded organizations, colleges, and foundations, giving full-throated support to one unproven, often bizarre, alternative health cure after another. 

In each chapter, Ernst describes the alternative modalities, examines the current scientific evidence, and evaluates the consequences of the prince’s efforts. Fortunately, as he documents, Charles has been unsuccessful in getting his crazy ideas into Britain’s National Health System—but it’s not for lack of trying. If Charles were just another British citizen, his ignorant and misguided criticism about evidence-based medicine and his promotion of pseudoscience would be largely inconsequential. Unfortunately, Charles has often used the full power of his position in the Royal Family to criticize doctors and promote anti-science in the public sphere. Surprisingly, Ernst is sympathetic when describing the origins of Charles’s flawed thinking and, though bluntly critical, The Alternative Prince almost reads like a lamentation. As Ernst writes at the end, “[Charles] pursued a largely anti-science agenda and promoted the uncritical integration of unproven treatments into the NHS. In this way, I am afraid, he became an obstacle to progress in healthcare and generated more harm than good. My predominant feeling about that is sadness over a missed opportunity.”