You might not think it from the images of him roasting sausages, meeting dignitaries, and swigging mind-altering shamanic tea, but King Charles is a sick man. The British monarch was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year and is still battling it, putting his treatment on pause for his Australian and Samoan trip.
Given that Charles’ appearances on this tour were carefully timed to ensure he wouldn’t become exhausted, he’s obviously still suffering. So it should raise eyebrows that after the tour he didn’t return to his doctors in London, but to the Soukya Resort, a spa in Bangalore, India where he’ll be treated by Dr Issac Mathai, an elite practitioner of medical bunkum.
Mathai has apparently spent years advising Charles on how to stay healthy, having encountered him via Charles’ patronage of the British Holistic Medical Association. Mathai is a proponent of the pseudoscientific practices of homeopathy, acupuncture, and reflexology and his biography dismisses scientific medicine as “the conventional practice of ‘popping pills.'”
The Soukya Resort approaches its patients on the basis that they’re “multi-dimensional beings” whose “interconnected dimensions need to be in perfect harmony.” The resort claims to be able to treat everything from autism to the common cold, with one of their case studies reporting that a 65-year-old wheelchair-bound patient with cirrhosis of the liver was left able to walk after a two-month course of homeopathy, yoga, and naturopathy.
As for what treatment Charles will be undertaking? Well, as per The Telegraph, he was “very impressed” by their cow, which apparently produces milk with “special properties”. It also seems that Charles enjoys the shirodhara therapy, in which the “third eye” on his forehead will have warm oil or milk (probably from that cow he likes) dripped onto it.
None of this should come as much of a surprise to anyone familiar with Charles, who has a long history of embracing all manner of quackery. For example, for years he was an avid proponent of “Gerson Therapy,” in which cancer is treated by a strict regime of five coffee enemas per day and the patient’s blood is monitored by an Indigo Machine, a “quantum biofeedback device.” As Charles said in 2004:
“I know of one patient who turned to Gerson Therapy having been told she was suffering from terminal cancer and would not survive another course of chemotherapy. Happily, seven years later, she is alive and well. So it is vital that, rather than dismissing such experiences, we should further investigate the beneficial nature of these treatments.”
It’s somewhat difficult to find testimonials of those who’ve been through Gerson Therapy as, to be blunt, they tend to die of cancer. It’s also unknown whether Charles ever tried the coffee enemas, perhaps we should check with the nearest Starbucks to Buckingham Palace whether they’ve been getting any unusual orders.
Critics of Charles’ medical beliefs argue that pushing pseudoscience from his incredibly influential throne is actively damaging, with Michael Marshall of the Good Thinking Society saying: “It’s absolutely unequivocal that homeopathic remedies do not work and just because you happen to be in a position of extreme power and privilege, that doesn’t change that.”
Then again, it’s Charles’ body and he has the right to decide what course of treatment he wants to follow. Perhaps the silver lining for the Buckingham Palace doctors is that as homeopathic medicine is just water it’s not going to actively harm him, but I’m betting they’re wishing he was back in London so he could be getting treated for his cancer with, y’know, real medicine.