PRINCE Charles has only to open his mouth, it seems, to make others froth.

His latest crime has been to urge Westminster Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt to consider offering homeopathic remedies and treatments on the NHS. Since the Prince's conversations and letters are protected from freedom of information requests, and unavailable for public view, his critics are up in arms, 
without knowing precisely what he has said.

From the tone of the debate, it's not always easy to diagnose whether his detractors are more concerned about secret interference with government, or by the idea that a widely discredited alternative branch of medicine might become available free, thereby costing the beleaguered NHS additional millions.

I have sympathy with both points of view, but particularly with anxiety over undue influence of royals with bees in their bonnets. When it comes to homeopathy, however, opinion divides sharply. One understands why. Millions of pounds have been spent in recent years trying to establish whether this pharmaceutical penny-farthing has any medical credibility in the age of the drone. To date, the jury is not simply out, but calling for the death sentence, with senior medics routinely dismissing the field as a sham.

There's nothing new in this. Queen Victoria's Scottish physician John Forbes called homeopathy "an outrage to human reason", an opinion endorsed by James Simpson, whose discovery of chloroform certainly casts the benefits of tinctures of poison ivy or marshmallow into the shade.

Yet it was a Scot who first proposed the principles on which homeopathy was based. William Cullen, an 18th-century physician and chemist from Hamilton, wrote a treatise translated 200 years ago by a sceptical German doctor, Samuel Hahnemann. Moved by a spirit of scientific inquiry, Hahnemann put Cullen's ideas to the test, and bravely chewed the bark of the cinchona tree, which supposedly would cure malaria. He immediately began to suffer symptoms of the disease, as Cullen had predicted. Following that Damascene discovery the convert went on to create an elaborate theory of the benefits of ingesting, in vastly diluted quantities, a range of scary medicinal plants and substances.

Some of the ingredients used were potentially lethal, including belladonna and arsenic. Even so, given the primitive and often fatal methods practised then by bona fide doctors, you can see why homeopathic techniques might have caught on. Less explicable is that today, when medical miracles such as keyhole surgery and lung transplants are commonplace, thousands of homeopaths and their clients continue to swear by Hahnemann's ideas.

Now, I wouldn't pop any pill my GP had not warmly recommended or, preferably, tried on his own children first, but Prince Charles's cri de coeur still deserves attention. Like it or not, homeopathic medicine sometimes works. The reasons may be circumstantial – the placebo effect, the therapeutic properties of being listened to, or the body's natural process of healing. But while the preparation may have done nothing itself, those curative elements are an important part of conventional medicine too. The problem is, most of us are impatient, reaching for over-the-counter remedies without a thought for toxicity. The same goes for heavy-duty pills prescribed by doctors. While serious ailments need serious drugs, minor complaints could sometimes be treated in less aggressive, more natural ways.

This is not a plea for homeopathy to be offered on the NHS, but for the reasons behind its popularity to be explored and harnessed for state use. Could it be, for instance, homeopaths' clinics are less intimidating, practitioners have more time, or are more reassuring? That their arcane treatments give the body time to sort itself out, instead of being bombarded with industrial chemicals? Whatever the answers, there must be some quantifiable reason why such discredited methods nevertheless work.

Doctors or ministers who dismiss the value of alternative medicine may be right in purely scientific terms, but wrong in missing their psychological potential. Since the NHS is in no position to take the moral high ground these days, be it on budgets, management or patient care, it surely behoves its panjandrums to listen to what Prince Charles and his ilk are saying. As a homeopath might say, a little of what you don't fancy can sometimes do you good.