Dr Peter Fisher
Authority on alternative medicine who was the Queen’s Physician specialising in homoeopathy
DR PETER FISHER, who has died in a traffic collision aged 67, was one of the world’s leading authorities on homoeopathy and complementary medicine, and since 2001 had served as a Physician to the Queen, with responsibility for all homoeopathic treatment given to the Royal family.
He worked for more than 30 years at the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital (renamed the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine in 2010), which – unwarrantably, in the view of many scientists – became part of the University College London Hospitals group in 2002. Fisher was the hospital’s Director of Research from 1996 and, in addition, its Clinical Director from 1998 to 2014.
Asked to define homoeopathy, Fisher once observed that it “is based on the idea of like curing like. So you give a very small dose of something that could cause a similar illness if given [as] an enlarged dose. Some people say it’s like holding a mirror up to nature. You’re saying to the body, ‘OK, this is what your problem is, this is what the disease is.’”
Fisher was one of homoeopathy’s most devoted and convincing champions, articulate and authoritative as a writer and speaker, his pronouncements lent gravitas by his undeniable distinction as a physician.
He was not afraid to be combative, once telling an interviewer: “I will debate with anybody, anytime. The trouble is, sceptics don’t like that because they always lose … Many well-known sceptics avoid me because they lose the debate. What they prefer to do is to blog, or tweet, so they can make nasty sneering public remarks and you can’t come back at them.”
He was often aided in his cause by the mistakes of some of his opponents. In 2006 he publicly condemned Richard Dawkins – “He didn’t bother to check the literature before shooting his mouth off ” – for claiming that homoeopathy had been subject to no clinical trials, when in fact some 180 such trials had been carried out.
He did admit that “the homoeopathic community is in many ways its worst enemy, particularly in this country – we have people who make silly claims, frankly, who are not qualified and say things they really shouldn’t say, for instance, about preventing malaria.” But he was convinced that there was enough evidence to show conclusively that homoeopathy worked in many treatments, even if it was not necessarily possible to say why.
He would often observe that, contrary to popular perception, the amount spent by the NHS on complementary medicine was tiny, and lamented that funding was often reduced on the basis of what he called “a ‘we don’t understand how it works, therefore it doesn’t work’ argument”.
He also noted that “the sad truth is that the profits made by the drugs companies are so often the driving force behind accepted conventional medicine. And since there is no commercial gain to be derived from prescribing alternative therapies, the conventional medical world resists them.”
His critics, however, dismissed him as an eloquent peddler of quackery. The eminent pharmacologist David Colquhoun once described one of Fisher’s public performances as “half an hour of shameless cherry-picking of the evidence” and claimed that the RLHIM, which was criticised on more than one occasion by the Advertising Standards Authority for its claims about its treatments, was “a great embarrassment to the otherwise excellent UCLH Trust” and would not be tolerated if its patron did not happen to be the Queen.
The Royal family’s association with homoeopathic medicine extends back to Queen Victoria, who admired and was treated by Dr Frederic Quin, one of the founders of the London Homoeopathic Hospital in 1849; George VI permitted “Royal” to be suffixed to its name in 1948.
By long tradition one of the monarch’s physicians unofficially takes responsibility for homoeopathic treatment, and it was this role that Fisher took on in 2001. He modestly suggested that his appointment was “a matter of being in the right place at the right time” and praised both the Queen and the Prince of Wales for their openmindedness.
Peter Antony Goodwin Fisher was born on September 2 1950 to Antony Fisher and his wife Eve. He was educated at Tonbridge School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, before training at Westminster Hospital Medical School.
His first encounter with alternative medicine came when he went on a field trip to China while he was an undergraduate. “I was astonished to see a woman having surgery on her abdomen without an anaesthetic,” he recalled. “To manage the pain, all she had was three little acupuncture needles in her left ear. This was something I hadn’t been taught in any Cambridge lecture.”
He became ill himself as a medical student and when his doctors told him that nothing could be done to alleviate his symptoms, he gave himself homoeopathic treatment, with some success.
There were no opportunities at the time to be trained as a consultant in homoeopathy, so he took a position as a research fellow in rheumatology at Barts. By good luck a professor at the hospital shared his interest in homoeopathy and they published one of the first serious studies of the discipline, in the British Medical Journal. From 1986 he was the editor of the journal Homeopathy.
Peter Fisher was a Fellow of the Faculty of Homeopathy and had recently become its President; he was also elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1997. He travelled around the world as a lecturer, noting that homoeopathy was taken more seriously in most other countries, and suggesting that this was because in the UK patients are unusually submissive to the will of their doctors. In 2007 he was awarded the Polish Academy of Medicine’s Albert Schweitzer Gold Medal.
He died near the RLHIM when he was struck by a lorry while cycling.
Peter Fisher married, in 1997, Nina Oxenham; they had two daughters.