Edzard Ernst is a leading campaigner against alternative medicine. He is also highly intelligent and hardworking, so is a person of interest to me. As a high profile, dare I say vituperative, critic of complementary therapies, it helps to know what sort of man he is. I won’t say “Know thine enemy”, because I believe we are essentially all on the same side in our efforts to reduce the load of suffering in the world. We might just disagree on the means. To this end I have heard him speak, and read a couple of his books, and I defy any healthcare practitioner not to like him even just a teensy, weensy bit when you have read his excellent autobiographical book A Scientist in Wonderland.

It covers his life from childhood through medical school and all the way up to being the controversial Professor of Complementary Studies at Exeter University. If all you know of him is gleaned through the distorting speaker of social media, which somehow amplifies the worst in us, then you might be in for a surprise. I was. And here are some of those things I learnt which you might not have known either:

1. He is a truther
   • Yes; not the sort of truther who believes Brigitte Macron is a man or 9/11 was an inside job, but remember Ernst was born in the years following World War II…..in Germany. He grew up knowing there was a huge skeleton in the nation’s closet, and he came to realize that many of the older generations had lent their assent, even their enthusiastic assistance, to the Nazis. This left him feeling that the adults had no moral authority, and Ernst grew up feeling “unmoored and adrift.” If you follow his X/Twitter feed you will frequently be confronted by sobering snapshots of Jews who perished in the Nazi camps – snaps you would like to skip over to avoid the deep discomfort that they bring. The shame and bewilderment he felt about his country’s history pervades the book. How could his lovable, mild-mannered uncle have been a general in the Waffen SS? How could so many other seemingly decent and civilized people been so deeply involved in such an evil regime? It fostered in him the desire to confront things, to ask questions, to find answers. It seems to have led him to feel that to speak up about anything he sees as wrong, or harmful is his moral responsibility. However he is fully aware that rocking the boat can breed powerful enemies.
2. He was brought up in Bavaria by a naturopathically inclined mother and encouraged to run barefoot through the dewy grass
   • Yes, this is interesting. I was brought up being given aspirin dissolved in Coke on an almost daily basis for any minor ailment, (be it physical or emotional), and told to stay away from the woman next door because she drank herbal teas and had posters of acupuncture meridians on the wall. Ernst’s mother was clearly at the other end of the spectrum. She believed that the forces of nature could be harnessed to cure people of disease and followed Father Sebastian Kneipp for a time. Edzard grew up being treated with homeopathic remedies (which he 100% believed to be effective) and encouraged to take ice baths in the morning and run through dewy grass with no shoes on.
   • His mother even started a small rehabilitation hospital which grew into a substantial business by the 1970s, employing about 200 staff.
   • He maintained a belief in homeopathy into adulthood, through and beyond his medical training.
3. He was not highly academic at school, and wanted to be a jazz drummer
   • Apparently shy and insecure for a time, he morphed into an unruly non-conformist and was sent to a prison-like boarding school for a time as a consequence. (He managed to escape by getting himself expelled). His real teenage passion was traditional jazz, drumming being his preferred instrument. His mother had other plans. She had him earmarked for the medical director job within the family business and he was persuaded to enter medical school. Not having the grades required, he started on a psychology course. Disillusioned with the elastic facts and relative truths of this subject, which seemed to him like pseudoscience, he finally got into medical school and buckled down to some seriously challenging, robotic, fact learning.
4. He started his medical career at age 30, working in Germany’s only homeopathic hospital
   • He was, in fact, quite keen to work in a homeopathic hospital, a modality he had grown up with. He thought that homeopathy had benefitted him personally on a number of occasions, and had helped him to recover from infectious hepatitis as a boy. He found the rationale for its efficacy somewhat bewildering, but he had plenty of personal experience that it did work, and thought that maybe in this role he would get to the bottom of how it worked.
   • He found the hospital to be very well run; it had fantastic food, and patients got better, sometimes dramatically. Ernst began to treat his entire family, friends and even pets with homeopathic remedies, so bowled over was he by the results he saw. He also trained in acupuncture, herbal medicine, cupping, neural therapy and autogenic training. Surprised? I was.
   • He did seem to need to know more, though. He questioned the medical director about the exact method by which these treatments worked. He was surprised to hear him attribute the excellent results largely to the fact that they took patients off the useless medications they had previously been on. They also utilized the placebo effect with good results. On one occasion, Ernst managed to halt a severe asthma attack with an injection of saline, telling the patient that it was a very powerful drug which would have an immediate effect.
   • He had some criticisms of the homeopathic doctors:
     • they were a bit pushy about their values, and unashamedly evangelical in their effort to convert everyone to a belief in homeopathy.
     • He also felt they lacked confidence, and found the high demands and complexity of conventional medicine too difficult. He says that some of them did not seem to be cut out to be “real” doctors, and could struggle with conventional diagnosis (one even using dowsing as an alternative – much easier!). They were not always proficient at basic techniques such as injections or biopsies.
   • He left after about 6 months to work in more conventional hospitals, but did not seem to do so from any sense of great disillusionment. In fact, he continued with alternative techniques as a hobby, even training in massage techniques and spinal manipulation.
5. He loves the women in his life
   • He dedicates this book to his wife, Danielle. They met in London, when he was playing a jazz gig. They were both in other relationships. After much soul searching and deliberation they realized that this was no mere infatuation, but the Real Thing, and that they simply had to be together. He moved to London to be with her. He adored her then and she is clearly the Love Of His Life.
   • He also has obvious respect and love for his mother. What woman doesn’t respect a man who cherishes the important women in his life?
6. He was excited to get the chance to establish scientific foundations for alternative medicine
   • In 1992, wanting to work in England, (a country he loves so much that he obtained British Citizenship) and also still interested in alternative medicine, he saw an advertisement for the “Laing Chair in Complementary Medicine” at the University of Exeter. Hooray! Finally a chance to get some proper evidence behind this scientifically neglected field. The interview process included an afternoon sherry party and questions from the Queen’s homeopath, before he was hugely pleased to be offered the job, and jubilant in accepting the role which appeared to be tailormade for him.
   • He was surprised by the hostility towards his appointment, which seemed to be based on the fact that he was a doctor, and that he wanted to research rather than promote alternative therapies. There is not such a great divide between orthodox and alternative medicine in Germany, unlike in the UK where the battle lines seem clearly drawn. (However he is critical of the German medical establishment, which he found hierarchical and autocratic, to the extent that you could not ask a question as this would be taken as incompetence. In contrast, he felt British medicine was suffused with a far more genuine spirit of scientific enquiry.)
   • Ernst did not take the Exeter job in order to debunk alternative medicine (which he now calls SCAM I believe – so-called alternative medicine). In fact he paints a rather charming picture of his excitement during a spiritual healing trial. During the trial he actually witnessed patients able to get out of their wheelchairs and walk. Ultimately, though, the data didn’t stack up and it turned out that some of those patients with the dramatic results had had sham healing. The great results seemed to rely on the placebo response.
   • They conducted over 40 more trials into various interventions, along with over 300 systematic reviews. Over the years he became more and more disillusioned with alternative therapies, and faced more and more attacks from those who didn’t like his findings, to the point that he sometimes feared for his safety. He ended up fighting back, and becoming more outspoken over the years, but this only seemed to fuel the fire.
7. He recommends St John’s Wort for depression
   • Edzard Ernst is not against all “alternative remedies”, even now, and his King of Alternative Remedies is St John’s Wort, which he recommends for mild to moderate depression. He believes the double blinded, randomized controlled trial to be the best research method we currently have, and so any intervention that passes that test is OK by him.
   • Back in 2008, he published a list of treatments that do more good than harm. it includes red clover, acupuncture, massage, hypnobirthing, melatonin….I don’t know if he still stands by this list, but I would love to hear his latest version.
   • One of his proudest awards was the Kneipp Preis for publishing a paper on the remarkable effects of regular garlic consumption on blood rheology. The framed document still hangs on the wall of his office.
8. He is very political
   • Yes, he is on Twitter/X, quite a lot.
   • If you like your X timeline to be filled with cute cat pictures, uplifting affirmations written in floral fonts and things that make you go Ahhhh…, he’s not the follow for you.
   • He has no hesitation about expressing his political preferences, and posts prolifically about current events, alongside giving alternative medicine a good bashing and ensuring that we don’t forget the horrors of the holocaust. If all you know of Ernst is his social media utterings, I would urge you to read this book to get a more rounded picture of this interesting character and his motivations.
9. He is not a royalist
   • The royal family are known for their love of homeopathy and other natural medicines, the former Prince Charles in particular. Ernst, however, regards him as a naïve promoter of quackery.
   • In fact, he is so anti-the-King-formerly-known-as Prince Charles, that he has even written a book entitled Charles; The Alternative King. An Unofficial Biography – it’s on my ever-expanding pile of books I would like to read when I have time
   • I believe that his extreme antipathy is largely due to the fact that he believes that King Charles was influential in the most “unpleasant period of [his] entire professional life” and the closure of his unit at Exeter University.

10. He is very productive

• if you go to Pubmed you will find a great many articles bearing Ernst’s name.
• additionally, he churns out quite a few books, with evidence of clear thinking, a strong sense of purpose and a highly organized mind. His 2022 Alternative Medicine, which critiques 202 alternative modalities ranging from blood letting to tiger balm to iridology to the intriguingly named “perineum sunning” (!?!?!?) looks to be a comprehensive assessment of the RCT-style scientific evidence. Osteopathy gets 3 pages, but you will have to fork out circa £20 to know what he says.

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This might be a long post, but it contains only a fraction of the fascinating material in this book. I highly recommend you read it. It is worth it for the image alone of how he “skipped over his own shadow” – self help and poetry all in one. Agree or disagree with him, he’s a remarkable character.

You can buy the book here