King Charles’s appointment of a pro-homeopathy head of the royal medical household has been described as worrying and inappropriate by academics and campaigners.

Dr Michael Dixon, who has championed faith healing and herbalism in his work as a GP, has quietly held the senior position for the last year, the Sunday Times reported.

While Dixon, 71, is head of the royal medical household, for the first time the role is not combined with being the monarch’s physician. Duties include having overall responsibility for the health of the king and the wider royal family – and even representing them in talks with government.

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He once invited a Christian healer to his surgery to treat chronically ill patients and experimented with prescribing an African shrub called devil’s claw for shoulder pain, as well as horny goat weed for impotence, the Sunday Times reported.

Edzard Ernst, emeritus professor at the University of Exeter, whose work has debunked alternative medicine, said: “Anyone who promotes homeopathy is undermining evidence-based medicine and rational thinking. The former weakens the NHS, the latter will cause harm to society.

“We and others have shown that homeopathy is not an effective therapy, which has today become the accepted consensus. To me, this means its only legitimate place is in the history books of medicine.”