But why has alternative medicine become so popular? In Britain, the Queen has long espoused homeopathy, and Prince Charles actively campaigns for complementary medicine. (“He’s an absolute bloody menace on this,” according to Colquhoun.) But on a broader front, the trend also coincides with what some have dubbed “the Endarkenment”: a swing of the pendulum away from the rationalist values and scientific thinking of the Enlightenment and back towards the type of thinking more characteristic of an age of religion and superstition.
The trend has provoked an attempt by scientists and others to stem the rising tide of twaddle, gobbledygook and mumbo-jumbo. Colquhoun has taken a particular interest in trying to stop universities awarding BSc degrees in complementary and alternative medicine, using freedom of information legislation to try to get access to course literature. To Colquhoun (“72, dammit, and still doing science”), any university offering a BSc course in homeopathy might just as well be offering BSc courses in witchcraft or astrology. “There isn’t much one can do about high street homeopaths as long as they stay within the law,” he says. “It’s quite a different matter when universities start to teach students that amethysts emit ‘high yin energy’ and so on. That sort of nonsense corrupts the university and corrupts science itself.”