Coda

After publishing Trick or Treatment with Simon Singh in 2008, it dawned on me that certain aspects of my experience as a researcher of alternative medicine might be of interest to the wider public. This was when I began work on this book. Those who read early drafts strongly advised me to widen the focus and to include not just my “Exeter years” but also those that had come before. This effectively turned the book into a memoir and a much more personal account than I had originally wanted.

Looking back to my childhood, I see a timid boy who grew into a somewhat rebellious adolescent, frequently challenging his elders and asking uncomfortable questions. I am not sure I have changed that much since then. Certainly a tendency towards doubt and irreverence, coupled with an irrepressible sense of curiosity, have remained prominent features of my character and were doubtlessly influential in leading me towards becoming a scientist tackling awkward subjects.

At first glance, the two topics of my research during recent decades - alternative medicine and health care during the Third Reich - might appear to be almost entirely unrelated. On closer inspection, however, intriguing links on several levels do emerge.

Alternative medicine was embraced enthusiastically by the Nazis. They called it Naturheilkunde (natural medicine), and its integration with conventional health care under the banner of Neue Deutsche Heilkunde (New German Medicine) became an officially sanctioned health policy early on during the Third Reich. With its emphasis on inexpensive, natural and wholesome treatments, alternative medicine appealed to the National Socialist worldview, in which the acquisition of optimum health was seen as a patriotic duty of the German Volk and a moral virtue befitting the supposedly superior Aryan race.

The Nazi policy of deliberately amalgamating alternative and conventional medicine bears many similarities to what is today known as “integrative medicine”. The Nazis also created an entirely new health profession of non-medically trained practitioners of alternative medicine - the Heilpraktiker-a profession which is still very much in existence. Similarly, the influence of Nazi theories concerning “natural health” can also be seen in the contemporary school of alternative medicine known as Germanische Neue Medizin (German New Medicine), which promotes itself as a method of curing all sorts of conditions, including cancer. It is the bizarre brainchild of a German physician who seems to think that mainstream medicine is a Jewish conspiracy whose sole purpose is to annihilate gentiles.

Apologists for alternative medicine do not like reading this sort of information and tend to get upset by it. In 2013, Peter Fisher, the Queen’s homeopath and editor of the journal Homeopathy, even fired me from the editorial board of his journal stating that I had “smeared homeopathy and other forms of complementary medicine with a ‘guilt by association’ argument, associating them with the Nazis”. But the association between alternative medicine and the Third Reich is surely not my invention; it is an indisputable historical fact, and nothing can be gained by ignoring it.

From a personal perspective, the most enduring impact of my investigations into this dark period of modern European history was a growing awareness of the overriding importance of medical ethics. My research into the Nazis’ violations of medical ethics and their deliberate use of pseudoscience in pursuit of ideological ends had sensitized me and sent a clear signal: once we lose our focus on the basic principles that must govern medicine at all times, health care professionals can, and often do, behave atrociously.

A rather dramatic reminder of the link between Nazi ideology and alternative medicine was provided by the unlikely figure of Claus Fritzsche, a German journalist who regularly published pro-quackery essays for the unsuspecting German public and had long used this platform to systematically defame me. This did not bother me all that much; I had, after all, grown used to vitriolic attacks from promoters of pseudoscience. But Fritzsche’s pillorying took a more sinister complexion when it was revealed in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that he was being paid generously by several large German manufacturers of homeopathic remedies to publish his defamatory articles. Intrigued, I decided to research Fritzsche’s activities in more depth and, in doing so, I stumbled upon an entirely unexpected nexus between my two major research themes.

On 1 May 1945, just after Hitler had taken his life, Magda and Josef Goebbels (Reich Minister of Propaganda) killed themselves and six of their children in Hitler’s Berlin bunker. The only child of the Goebbels family to survive was Harald Quandt, Magda’s son from her first marriage, whom Goebbels had adopted. After the war, Quandt turned industrialist and became the owner of several large enterprises, including a leading homeopathic manufacturer. This company turned out to be one of those paying Fritzsche to write his derogatory articles. After the Süddeutsche Zeitung had disclosed these financial arrangements, the companies ended their financial support of Fritzsche. On 14 January 2014, about two years after these events, Fritzsche took his own life.

This depressing story speaks for itself and confirms something that I had become sure of: the most important link between my research into alternative medicine and that related to the Third Reich was that of medical ethics.

It should be axiomatic that ethics is indispensable to the practice of medicine, and is not something that can just be switched off at will. No branch of health care, including alternative medicine, can be considered exempt from it. But the subject of ethics is seldom even considered in alternative medicine; many alternative practitioners have never been taught medical ethics, and where training in this area does exist, it tends to be at best superficial. There are thousands of books on alternative medicine but hardly more than a handful cover the subject of medical ethics in any depth. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the principles of medical ethics are routinely ignored and frequently violated by promoters of alternative medicine.

Medical ethics seem to me to be violated, for example: when homeopaths prescribe or recommend homeopathic vaccinations for which there is not a shred of evidence; when chiropractors or other alternative practitioners happily promote bogus treatments for children with asthma or other serious conditions; when practitioners fail to obtain informed consent before commencing their treatments; when Prince Charles sells his “detox tincture” which is unable to eliminate poisons from your body, merely cash from your purse; when quacks inveigle desperate cancer patients by pretending they have found a cure; when pharmacists sell Bach Flower Remedies or other glorified placebos; when applied kinesiologists, iridologists, etc. claim that their baseless diagnostic tests are able to identify serious diseases; when pseudoscientists claim that certain alternative therapies are evidence-based because they managed to generate a false positive result purely by cherry-picking or massaging their data; when politicians who lack even the most basic understanding of science publicly support quackery, proclaiming that it is evidence-based.

And so on, and so on.

Some might criticize me here for claiming the moral high ground. But if I do so, it is for a good reason. Medical consultations are intrinsically unequal, with the clinician occupying a position of considerable power over often highly vulnerable patients. This places an important ethical onus on the caregiver to assist patients in making informed choices - an imperative and a trust that is breached each and every time that unproven nostrums born of ideology and wishful thinking are offered to people with assertions that they are an effective, valid approach to the treatment of disease.

When science is abused, hijacked or distorted in order to serve political or ideological belief systems, ethical standards will inevitably slip. The resulting pseudoscience is a deceit perpetrated on the weak and the vulnerable. We owe it to ourselves, and to those who come after us, to stand up for the truth, no matter how much trouble this might bring.

Today, I look back at the often stormy past from the peaceful vantage point of my retirement with a mixture of satisfaction and incredulity. The doctor and scientist may still be full of questions, but the musician in me breathes a sigh of relief that the performance, with all its impossible demands and fiendishly difficult passages, is finally over.