Peter Hain: “since I was running the place I could more or less do what I wanted to do…”

The former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland [and Wales, etc! – Ed], Peter Hain, has been reminiscing about the good old days…

“When I was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in 2005-07, [Prince Charles] was delighted when I told him that since I was running the place I could more or less do what I wanted to do.

“I was able to introduce a trial for complementary medicine on the NHS, and it had spectacularly good results, that people’s well-being and health was vastly improved.

“And when he learnt about this he was really enthusiastic and tried to persuade the Welsh government to do the same thing and the government in Whitehall to do the same thing for England, but not successfully,” added Mr Hain.

That might be because they’re not users of complementary medicine themselves, and more concerned about ethics than some

Of course, the BBC seem more concerned about the unsuccessful lobbying by Prince Charles, rather than the actions of the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland when he introduced the trial £200,000, self-assessed, pilot scheme administered by Get Well UK here – as the Get Well website now notes “As of March 2011, the organisation is closed.”

I never did see an official response to that scam scheme from a locally elected NI Minister for Health, and the department provides no further detail beyond a May 2008 “Independent Evaluation Report”.

One remaining question is why BBC NI were so enthusiastic in producing the accompanying propaganda to the scheme in 2008 – Get Well Northern Ireland?  The BBC links to that programme propaganda no longer work, but the (defunct) Get Well UK website is still promoting it.

As I noted in a related post here, from Edzard Ernst

“My plea is simply for honesty. Let people buy what they want, but tell them the truth about what they are buying. These treatments are biologically implausible and the clinical tests have shown they don’t do anything at all in human beings.

Indeed.

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