P1. We believe we should be able to make an informed choice about healthcare treatments as we do about anything else
P2. Making misleading claims about healthcare therapies in order to encourage sick people to try them is unethical and potentially dangerous
P3: The vast majority of misleading claims are made about CAM treatments
P4. There are regulations in place intended to prevent questionable claims being made in the promotion of healthcare therapies
C1: Healthcare practitioners shouldn’t make misleading claims in their advertising
C2: We can and should challenge those misleading claims and try to get them withdrawn.

The most novel response so far has been homeopath Sue Trotter’s public explanation of her cunning plan to defend homeopathy from complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority by playing the race card.

If we can find some British Indians/ Pakistanis or Bangladeshi’s they can complain to the ASA explaining that homeopathy is a prefered system of medicine in their countries of origin, used to treat a wide range of illnesses. The current wave of complaints against homeopaths would therefore seem to be an attack on their culture and beliefs and therefore discriminatory. (I know homeopathy is not a belief system but many think it is, so why not use that to our advantage).

In the ensuing twitter storm, one tweeter put it more succinctly:

Homeopaths with integrity will no doubt be appalled and embarrassed by this suggestion and, although they haven’t found the time yet, I expect they’ll be publicly disassociating themselves from it and condemning it on Twitter and their various blogs very soon.

But in Sue Trotter’s defence, at least she is thinking out of her box, so to speak. Other responses have included the drearily familiar attempts to misrepresent facts, motives and arguments and cast aspersions. Let’s start with an extract from from Lionel Milgrom’s website:

These days, homeopathy is coming under mounting criticism for supposedly lacking any scientific evidence. Indeed, a group calling itself the Nightingale Collaboration has set its sights on anyone claiming homeopathy has any therapeutic benefits because of its putative ‘implausibility’.

I wish! Unfortunately, the Nightingale Collaboration has only set its sights on anyone making misleading claims about the products and services offered by healthcare practitioners. That the NC chose to focus on homeopathy first is not so much because it is scientifically implausible than because there simply isn’t any robust evidence that homeopathy is effective for anything and yet hundreds of UK homeopaths are claiming to be able to treat everything from asthma to multiple sclerosis.

Last year, for example, I found a pile of leaflets in the waiting area of my local optician advertising the services of a homeopath and stating that homeopathy could treat heart disease and cancer.

Who knows how many similarly outrageous leaflets by other unscrupulous quacks are still in circulation?

The Nightingale Collaboration’s official launch on 1st March coincided with the extenstion of the Advertising Standards Authority’s digital remit, which meant that we could finally start complaining about the pernicious self-promotion all over the web of people who push this nonsense.

The websites I personally complained about included one that suggested homeopathic remedies could be used to prevent pertussis and tetanus and another that advises us to

avoid antivirals, antibiotics, vaccinations, cell phones, wireless radiation, stress and other negative emotions, etc. as they lower the immune system…when you do catch the flu a 30 min. acute consultation (can be by phone) is required to establish the remedy that most closely corresponds to your flu symptoms. A chronic illness requires a 90 min. consultation.

Yet another claimed homeopathy could help people with HIV/AIDs and suggested that

By keeping patients healthy and balanced homeopathy might slow disease processes down.

Claims such as these are unsupportable and potentially harmful. It follows that making them is unethical and indefensible. It is not wrong to try to get such claims removed; it is wrong to make them in the first place. If you are one of the people who can’t see this then you are stupid and irresponsible and you should be ashamed of yourself.

We don’t make the rules

Fortunately, there are regulations in place to ensure that advertising is legal, decent, honest and truthful. Unfortunately, they don’t go far enough, in my opinion. If I made the rules, they would be more stringent. For example, I would forbid anyone who is selling a healthcare therapy or service from stating hogwash like,

homeopathy acts by virtue of a resonance between the energy pattern of the remedy and the person’s energy body

unless preceded by the words, ‘homeopaths believe’. Stop presenting this faith-based therapy with its fanciful explanations and weird rituals as if it were based on proven facts, because gullible people tend to believe whatever they like the sound of. Having them believe you might be good for business and wouldn’t matter too much if homeopathic treatments were only being taken to treat, say, nocturnal leg cramps, which is why one acquaintance of mine swears by it. It matters rather more when taken to treat malaria or colorectal cancer.

That said, the fact that the regulations as they stand are being breached on a massive scale by homeopaths and other healthcare practitioners makes the task of challenging them somewhat easier. We simply have to complain about them to the ASA and to other regulatory bodies as appropriate. The decision on whether their rules are being broken lies not with the NC but with the regulatory bodies themselves, obviously.

That the NC was set up to help and encourage people to use this very legitimate means of challenging false claims provoked much self-righteous indignation from those who want to spout whatever baloney they like all in the cause of lining their own pockets. “Sceptics acting like policemen”, is how one critic put it in an email to me. Well, why the hell shouldn’t we act like policemen? You’re the ones who are trying to con us into buying your worthless cult therapies, not the other way around, so spare us the sanctimonious whining.

Red Herrings

Here’s Lionel again:

This willful attitude of closed-mindedness (that incidentally, would see the public robbed of its right to receive homeopathic treatment free on the NHS), ignores the fact that by end of 2009, 142 trials of homeopathy had been published in peer-reviewed journals. In terms of statistically significant results, 74 of these trials were able to draw firm conclusions: 63 were positive (patients given a homeopathic medicine improved significantly more than the comparison group given either an inactive placebo or established conventional treatment), and 11 were negative (i.e., no significant difference was seen between the action of the homeopathic medicine and the comparison group)  [ref 1].

The evidence Lionel references has been examined and re-examined and exposed for being deeply flawed time and time again on many websites and blogs, including this one. It is precisely because the evidence presented for homeopathy is so weak that homeopathy is so confidently ridiculed and its availability on our NHS so passionately opposed.

I have asked it before and I’ll ask it again: Why on earth do homeopathists think we wouldn’t be absolutely delighted if homeopathy – or any other quack therapy for that matter – was as good as they say it is? It would revolutionise healthcare systems and save our National Health Service a fortune. Pharmaceuticals that have taken years and cost millions to research and develop could be replaced by homeopathic remedies produced at a fraction of the cost. I’m aware that my least favourite homeopathic ingredient – excrementum caninum – can be produced very cheaply and goes a long, long way when used in homeopathic remedies. In fact, it is diluted so much there’s nothing left of it. Thank goodness.

The answer they commonly give is that we’re all “denialists”, wilfully closed-minded to the manifest benefits of CAM because we are being paid by Big Pharma. Well, people who would stoop to claiming that sugar pills have the power to treat serious diseases in order to make a few quid would say that, wouldn’t they? In fairness, I’m not saying that everyone who exploits the vulnerability of sick and desperate people by pushing worthless therapies at them is only motivated by money. I think they get off on the feeling of power that being a…ahem…”healer” brings too.

But I’ve never really understood why they think Big Pharma would pay us to oppose something with so many benefits for humankind, rather than just cash in on it. This is how one anonymous correspondent explained it to me:

The current smear campaign against CAM is due more to it having a positive rather than negative effect, and its growing popularity is beginning to worry drug companies. Pharmaceuticals are big business, and if the public loses faith in prescription drugs then it will severely affect their profits.

The main reason I haven’t posted here much over the past several months is that I wasn’t feeling well. I spent many weeks over the winter waiting for medical appointments and then spent many hours sitting in hospital waiting rooms that were packed with other people and their loathsome diseases. I can’t say I’ve seen any evidence that the British public are abandoning the NHS with its medically qualified personnel and modern pharmaceuticals, so I’m not convinced that Big Pharma feels threatened by homeopathy at all, let alone enough to start paying anyone to attack it.

Do they seriously think people working for pharmaceutical companies couldn’t find another way to get rich? If homeopathy worked, they could surely cash in on it. Even though it doesn’t work, the Boiron family seem to be doing well out of it.

If only homeopathy worked, I’m sure many of us would be queuing up to train as homeopaths. Given the prices some of my local homeopaths are charging – up to £90 for an initial consultation and up to £50 for every follow-up appointment – it would seem that, if only they can get enough people to believe in it, a decent living could be made from homeopathy. That’s even more than Big Pharma are paying me to write this blog.

Lies, damned lies…

If it worked of course, there would be an abundance of good quality clinical trials demonstrating it conclusively. But there isn’t – there is only an abundance of crappy little trials which, on the whole, prove homeopathy works no better than placebo. That would explain why the lies told by homeopaths on their websites are such huge lies, such brazen lies, such desperate lies. Like this one from Lionel Milgrom:

In addition, the Nightingale Collaboration ignores on-going research published by the British Medical Journal which demonstrates that out of 2500 conventional medical procedures tested recently, only 11% proved beneficial, while more than half (51%) turned out to be of unknown effectiveness [ref 2].

If Lionel would actually read the paper he references and links to, he would see that it doesn’t refer to “2500 conventional medical procedures” but to “3000 treatments” and that,

included within the category of unknown effectiveness are many treatments that come under the description of complementary medicine, for example, acupuncture for low back pain and echinacea for the common cold….

So it’s not about conventional treatments, it’s about all kinds of treatments, including the one Lionel is peddling. To be fair, maybe Lionel did what all quacks seem to do and just took someone’s word for it, instead of reading the damn paper. That reminds me of a jolly jape you might like to try:

1. Google the phrase: ‘Homeopathy was recognised by an Act of Parliament in 1948 as a safe alternative form of medicinal treatment’.
2. Select a bunch of websites that include this claim – there were dozens when I tried this some months ago;
3. Send a polite email asking them which Act of Parliament this claim refers to;
4. Sit back and enjoy any responses. You probably won’t get many.

To cut a long story short, one advertiser I contacted spilt the beans with this:

Thank you for your email concerning the Homoeopathy Act of Parliament. This information came from a homoeopathy booklet that was the main source for the page. This information seems to be widely spread and taken for granted.

Evidently.

One advertiser told me that homeopathy itself was “ratified” by parliament under The Faculty of Homeopathy Act 1950 (untrue), while someone at the Society of Homeopaths, to whom I was referred by another clueless advertiser, said:

I believe the information maybe referring  to the 1948 NHS Act from which time homeopathy has been available on the NHS which does not endorse homeopathy.

That sounds about right.

My favourite response was from the owner of this site.

I have received your enquiry through my website re the 1948 Act relating to homeopathy. I would be delighted to answer your query and discuss this further. Send me your name and number and I will give you a call to chat through.

I think she’ll do well in her chosen career. I see that claim is still on her site, together with claims that homeopathy helps autism, Crohn’s disease, fertility problems and much more besides. (Edit: 29/11/11. I’ve just seen the site is currently offline. I have the claims page frozen for posterity, however.)  Most of the others I contacted – among them the Homeopathic Medical Association – have removed it, to their credit. Another who hasn’t is Nelson’s, which is where I spotted it in the first place. I didn’t even get the courtesy of a response from them but then you know what these callous drug companies are like.

Anyway, that digression was simply another illustration of how homeopaths seem to believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of the evidence and therein lies the explanation of why they became homeopaths in the first place. By the way, I hope everyone’s read Le Canard Noir’s illuminating blog entitled, Escaping the cult of homeopathy, which quotes extensively from an ex-homeopath/cult survivor.

…tu quoque…

But to get back on topic, what does the effectiveness or otherwise of conventional medicine have to do with the Nightingale Collaboration, whose purpose is to challenge misleading claims in the promotion of healthcare treatments to the public? As the NC website states in the FAQs:

If there are misleading claims in advertising for conventional medicine, then we believe these should be challenged too and the resources we make available on this site should help people to do that.

The most common response from defenders of altmed to skeptics is to talk about the failings of conventional medicine. There is a widespread failure on the part of altmed defenders to comprehend that the failings of conventional medicine have no bearing whatsoever on the truth of whether alternative medicines work or not. A lot of them seem to take the view that anyone who attacks quackery is by definition an apologist for every sin ever committed in the history of mainstream medicine and, according to some of them – such the embittered group of chiros who hang around chiropracticlive and stalk skeptics’ blogs – we’re “bigots” for attacking CAM and ignoring conventional medicine. (By ‘bigots’ they of course mean ‘hypocrites’ – they’re not the sharpest knives in the drawer.) It’s the tu quoque fallacy.

What I say to such people is that the only thing we can do about conventional medicine is challenge any misleading claims made in its advertising to the public. Same as for CAM, in fact. The NC website is full of information about how to make complaints, so if you come across a UK website or other advertisement promoting a healthcare product or service that you believe is making a false claim, then use the information helpfully provided to do something about it. Together we can work to ensure that healthcare advertising is truthful and accurate! And if you come across conventional medicine websites that make false claims about being able to treat heart disease and cancer or prevent whooping cough or measles, then please send an email alerting the Nightingale Collaboration. (Assuming you believe it’s OK to police such websites and try to get such claims removed. I do.)

…and diversions

While busy policing CAM websites, I have seen several that do not make false claims, demonstrating that it is possible to promote CAM without lying. It is indisputable, however, that the vast majority of misleading healthcare claims appearing in advertising aimed at the UK general public are in promotions for CAM therapies and products. You can try to divert attention away from that fact but you can’t hide it and it becomes wearisome to see opponents of the NC resort to diversionary strategies such as going on about stuff we can’t do anything about. Like Lionel Milgrom does with:

Then a House of Commons Select Committee reported that in 2006 alone, a staggering 2.68 million people i.e., 4.5% of the UK population) were harmed by the effects, side-effects, and errors of conventional medical practice [ref 3]. In the USA, the situation is even worse: its healthcare system is the third leading cause of mortality in the US after heart disease and cancer….more deaths than through firearms [ref 4].

Good grief – the Nightingale Collaboration to the rescue! Let’s forget about challenging false claims in advertising and sort out the USA healthcare system shall we? What a dickhead. (If anyone thinks that’s harsh, I invite them to read what Lionel said about Lord Taverne here.)

But Lionel’s not the only one. Quite a few critics think we shouldn’t be spending our time on the heinous crime of trying to ensure that healthcare advertising is truthful and would be better employed instead doing just about anything else including,

complaining about so called pharmaceutical drugs and their effects on humankind

(doing something) about the many dangers in food production, such as the use of aspartame, and the continued widespread use of flouride,

going after the drug companies and getting them to put “Taking this drug may endanger your life/health” in large RED Letters on the label and in adverts,

protecting us from misapplied drug therapy, covered up drug trials, commercial frauds by the pharma industry. Government funded misguided political errors. Scientists with the compassion and emotional level of a newt,

All the above suggestions were culled from emails and – yes, I know – it’s amazing just how much power and influence our critics seem to think we have, isn’t it? By the way, Ben Goldacre blogs about the evils of Big Pharma fairly regularly (recent examples: 1, 2, 3) but I don’t see many quacks applauding him for doing so.

Best of all was the tweet by the holistic vet:

The Nightingale Collaboration have their sites on #homeopathic folk. Pity they’re not concerned with arms manufacturers.

Yeah, we should really take on the arms manufacturers instead of challenging all those lies about being able to treat heart disease and prevent measles. We’d achieve world peace and they’d be able to continue ripping people off and endangering their lives. Win-win, I’d say.

Back to Lionel:

Also, the often-repeated claim by sceptics [ref 6] that homeopathy is dangerous because patients seek its help rather than conventional healthcare is simply not backed up by the evidence.

Well, it is actually. Have a look at this report, for example, from the National Cancer Institute in Karachi:

Breast cancer patients in Pakistan frequently (53%) delay seeking medical advice. Antecedent practice of CAM is widespread and a common underlying reason. The delay results in significant worsening of the disease process.

The report tells us that 70% of the CAM used is homeopathy.

The callous and dismissive attitude quacks display about victims of their propaganda reminds me of the anti-vaxers who protest that “only” 16 children died of measles in England and Wales in the year prior to the launch of the MMR jab. In fact it was the death of just one child, Cameron Ayres, that alerted me to the fact that putting faith in batshit insane therapies like homeopathy isn’t as harmless as I’d previously assumed. A hat-tip to the homeopath who is said to have begged Cameron’s parents to get him to proper doctors but, the thing is, if you encourage people to have faith in implausible and unsupported therapies in the first place, you’re not entirely blameless if people take you seriously and tragedies ensue. As the spokesman from the Society of Homeopaths told the BBC when the story of Cameron was reported,

Increasingly, with the rise in popularity of complementary medicine these situations are going to arise.

Quite.

Later I read the story of Janeza Podgorsek who died because he believed a homeopath’s claim that homeopathy would work to prevent him getting malaria and, when it didn’t, he believed the homeopath’s claim to be able to treat the malaria he’d caught. Most recently we’ve read about Penelope Dingle who refused to have the surgery that could have saved her life because she believed a homeopath could cure her colorectal cancer. And there are loads more at http://whatstheharm.net/.

Edit: A heartbreaking documentary on Penelope Dingle’s fate, has been uploaded to youtube and here’s an early news report on the alleged manslaughter of 4 year-old Luca Monsellato by his homeopathist parents.

Motives

So what on earth motivates us to try to get the kind of claims that have lead to needless deaths removed?

Yes, for people who are evidently so thick, so lacking in human compassion and empathy, so self-interested and so blinkered, that is a serious question and one to which, for precisely the same reasons, they are unable to grasp the answer even when it’s thrust right under their stupid noses.

Or could it be that they know their battle for the right to happily promote bogus therapies is all but lost and that the only battle they have left is a personal one against the people who burst their bubble? And that’s one they obviously can’t win because they have neither the ammunition nor the brains to use it.

I’ll leave the last word to one of them, who sent me this constructive suggestion.

Maybe you should detach yourselves from the Dark Cabal and global elite which plan to wipe out 90% of this human population, you really don’t wish to have this on your conscious or to deal with in kama,…and rather get to work on finding out why so many natural healing products CAN actually heal the patient, how quantum energy can be infused with this, and how our ancients were so much more advanced with this knowledge, making us look like living in the dark ages in comparison, with so many selling out the human race.

Yeah, whatever.

I’ve lost count of how many self-pitying blogposts by homeopaths I’ve seen begin with those words. The assault on homeopathy is continuing relentlessly and the poor homeopaths don’t know what’s hit them. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels a bit sorry for them.

Only joking. Didn’t you just love watching Tom Dolphin’s turn at the BMA conference recently? For those who missed it, Dolphin — who is deputy chairman of the BMA’s Junior Doctors Committee — announced that, contrary to his headline-grabbing comments back in May, homeopathy isn’t witchcraft after all. He graciously apologised for the offence caused to all the witches who’d objected to the association with homeopathy. “I take it back — it isn’t witchcraft”, said a contrite Dolphin, before going on to explain what homeopathy really is.

It’s nonsense on stilts. It’s pernicious nonsense that feeds a rising wave of irrationality that threatens to overwhelm the hard won gains of the Enlightenment and the scientific method. We risk as a society slipping back into a state of magical thinking when made up science passes for rational discourse and wishing for something to be true passes for proof.

Amen to that and the motion to stop funding homeopathy was carried overwhelmingly. The only surprise — apart from the fact that it’s taken them this long to get this far — being that anyone voted against it. Most of the speeches against the motion were the usual pap: “paucity of evidence does not amount to lack of efficacy,” whined one speaker, ignoring the wealth of evidence of hundreds of clinical trials; “It works — ask the people of anywhere in the world,” bleated another.

But the speeches against weren’t all that bad. Here’s London GP, Paddy Glackin:

I’ve got a group of patients who go to the homeopathic hospital and it’s a great relief to me that they do because, frankly, I’ve got nothing else to offer them. I am completely stuck while they have found a place where they are getting better and if we remove NHS funding I don’t know what I’m going to do with them because they have been extenisvely investigated, extensively managed and the only person they are getting benefit from is the guy who waves some water in their face and is really sweet to them once a month. That keeps them well.

That the homeopathic hospitals should serve as place where doctors can dump untreatable patients is probably the best argument for continuing to fund homeopathy on the NHS. But even if the NHS had infinite resources, I still wouldn’t support it because homeopathy is indeed ‘nonsense on stilts’ and it’s time we stopped pretending otherwise.

Enough already!

I recall the feminist conferences I attended in the 1970s and the fervent discussions we had about how the NHS was failing us. The ideas that were floated at the time contributed to the change in the culture of the doctor-patient relationship we’ve witnessed over the past few decades. These days we demand that our doctors are honest with us, that they listen to us and take us seriously and aren’t paternalistic and condescencing…don’t we?

A few years ago, I attended a talk given by Dr David Reilly, who qualified as a doctor of proper medicine but now works at the Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital. Dr Reilly started his talk by claiming there were some 200 positive trials for homeopathy. Thereafter he refused point blank to talk about homeopathy and he disregarded any challenges to the principles of homeopathy from the audience, stating he hadn’t come to discuss it. What he’d come to talk about was the work of the Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital and what he took an hour to say could be summed up thus:

Give some people a lovely, tranquil environment, a lot of time, a listening ear and a good bedside manner and they start to feel better.

This works regardless of whether any remedy prescribed has any active ingredients and we know, of course, that homeopathic remedies don’t. The reason I remember Dr Reilly’s talk so well was because it echoed precisely what we’d said at those meetings over thirty years ago and it has absolutely nothing to do with homeopathy. Back then, we all felt the NHS had an ugly paternalistic face and that it treated us something like the pie cases on a Fray Bentos assembly line, filling us with drugs instead of steak and kidney and sending us on our way. What we wanted to happen was something like this:

(1) Train doctors to ask sensitive questions to help patients get everything off their chest and to listen intently while patients prattle on about themselves.
(2) Allow doctors to spend an hour with each patient every visit.

Sorted. No need to refer anyone to a homeoquack so we can stop funding them pronto.

We knew then as we know now that the second requirement wouldn’t be fulfilled any time soon in a publicly-funded health care system, and that this would obviously impact negatively on the first requirement. Thus the new and improved generation of today’s GPs still end up, as Dr Paddy Glackin suggested in his speech, prescribing too many unnecessary meds that don’t work anyway and don’t get rid of chronically unwell patients who have nowhere else to go. That’s what the homeopathic hospitals are for.

Crikey, I could almost talk myself round into supporting them, were it not for the fact that I am haunted by the spectre of my dying mother being ejected from an NHS hospital without them even changing her nappy and with a fucking cannula still stuck in her arm because they were so short of beds and staff. Wanting to get rid of patients because you don’t know what else to do with them isn’t reason enough to lie to them and to spend £4 million out of the public purse annually financing the lie. As I once heard oncologist Prof Michael Baum say to a hysterical homeopathy user, “You can buy your homeopathy if you want but you can’t have it at the expense of other women’s lives”. It may only be a tiny portion of the NHS budget — as they never stop reminding us — but you can buy a lot of Tamoxifen for that.

It might seem callous to suggest that people who want the NHS to fund their homeopathy should buy themselves a tube of Smarties and ring the Samaritans for a nice chat instead. But these are hard times and if the NHS can’t afford proper meds, it needs to stop wasting money on pretend ones. It also needs to have the debate on the placebo effect that Martin Robbins called for in the Guardian recently. Perhaps most importantly, it needs to work out how to harness the benefits of the homeopathic consultation for the good of all patients. Just to reiterate: the benefis have nothing to do with homeopathic remedies. Let’s stop pretending that every health problem has an ingestible solution. That’s what homeopaths do and it’s a load of crap.

What’s next?

No doubt there are some who think that, once the NHS stops funding homeopathy and once Boots and other chemist shops stop presenting the remedies as if they do indeed have ‘therapeutic indications’, then there’d be nothing left for skeptics to do and we’ll shut up and move on to something else. But they’d be wrong. The problem is that homeopaths are liars. Yes, I know a lot of the lies are unintentional because they are delusional but for others there is no excuse. Take, for example, the oft-repeated claim of the “five systematic reviews” that supposedly amount to evidence for homeopathy. This lie is as common as pigeon shit and easily exposed for being exactly that. I caught and exposed the odious American homeoquack Dana Ullman repeating it here and in a previous blog I did the same favour for Jayne Thomas of the Society of Homeopaths, who had the audacity to repeat the falsehood on national TV. Martin did an excellent job in another Guardian column more recently.

Talking of the Society of Homeopaths, apart from telling porkies on national TV and bullying skeptics who tell the truth about them, what exactly is it for? Browsing the Society’s website, I came across its Code of Ethics and Practice and skimmed through it. One line leaped out at me:

“No advertising may be used which expressly or implicitly claims to cure named diseases”.

Quite right too. However, given the dishonesty that is the very essence of the whole cult of homeopathy, I wasn’t particularly surprised to come across this claim on a member’s website (actually the first hit on Google after entering ‘registered with the Society of Homeoapths’):

Basically any condition you would see a GP for can be treated homeopathically.

It doesn’t name any diseases, it simply claims to be able to treat any condition under the sun. WTF??

I am approaching the age my mother was at when she discovered the lump in her breast that turned out to be a malignant tumour necessitating a mastectomy, which allowed her to live for another 30 years. If only she’d seen a homeopath instead of her GP, eh?  She might have saved herself a lot of trouble and just died a slow, agonising premature death like Penelope Dingle did.

Yes, people should be free to make their own choices about health as long as they fund their more eccentric choices out of their own pockets rather than everyone else’s. Does that mean that UK homeopaths working outside of the NHS should be able to say whatever nonsense they like on their websites and in their promotional literature? I think not. Thanks to the efforts of skeptics fed up with seeing desperate people being conned by unscrupulous quacks, the chiropractic ‘profession’ now has to mind its ps and qs. It’s high time the homeopaths got a piece of the action.

There are heartfelt testimonials on various internet fora from people she has helped — mostly CFS sufferers who hadn’t been helped by the NHS and who were desperate enough to turn to a private doctor with a  website containing some highly questionable assertions about a range of health issues. I’ve no reason to doubt the sincerity of the stories of recovery from grateful patients. Those telling them demand to know why the only doctor who has actually helped them is being investigated by the General Medical Council (GMC) and faces losing her licence.

Yesterday Dr Myhill attended a hearing of the GMC’s Interim Orders Panel in connection with two complaints made about her. The first complaint, by a group of doctors, was filed in June 2009 and apparently concerns Dr Myhill’s recommendation on the strength of one blood test that a young patient with a neurological disease, whom she had not met nor seen the medical notes of, be administered B12 and magnesium sulphate injections

The second complaint was filed a few weeks ago. The complainant, who posts on the Bad Science forum under the name of ‘Jonas’, started a thread over there with the announcement that he’d made a complaint about a range of recommendations Dr Myhill makes on her website. These, Jonas argued, are contrary to national guidance and safety limits and so may place people at risk. The recommendations are in connection with nutritional supplements, heart disease, contraception, breast cancer diagnosis and vaccines. None of this complaint appears to be about treatment relating to CFS, with the possible exception of the vitamin supplements.

The purpose of yesterday’s hearing was to decide whether any interim order should be placed on Dr Myhill pending the full hearing of the complaints. The worst case scenario for her would have been suspension for up to 18 months. The panel were not required to decide on matters of fact but on whether Dr Myhill was acting within her competence and expertise as a physician and whether there might be a need to protect the public in any way. They concluded that she probably wasn’t and there probably was.

Dr Myhill is now forbidden from prescribing any prescription-only medication and has been ordered to remove from her website content relating to the following:

• The medical management of cases relating to cardiology, or cardiovascular disease including; chest pain due to ischaemic heart disease; acute coronary syndrome; heart failure; or pulmonary embolus;
• The treatment of asthma;
• The treatment, testing, identification, diagnosis or management of breast cancer;
• The use of hormonal contraceptive medication;
• The pharmacological management of primary or secondary prevention of vascular disease;
• Any immunisation or vaccination;

They have also placed a range of restrictions on her with regard to seeking employment. See the hearing transcript and full verdict here.

Naturally, Dr Myhill will be very distressed as will her supporters. I’m not sure to what extent the CFS sufferers might be affected by her inability to prescribe prescription-only meds; I’ve seen speculation that it will have a catastrophic effect while they will be largely unaffected by the changes to her website.

I fully accept that CFS is an identifiable condition and that it can have a life-shattering effect on sufferers, a couple of whom I have known. (I recommend an account from Margaret Nelson’s blog: ME and me and the Daily Mail.) I have no opinion on the causes of CFS because I haven’t read enough about it. I am aware of some of the conflicting ideas about these. Indeed, I am aware there is conflict over the very existence of the syndrome. At one end of the spectrum seem to be arch cynics calling it a fake disease adopted by malingerers; at the other end are sufferers who take furious exception to anything that they rightly or wrongly interpret as implying their condition is pyschosomatic.

Medical opionion is divided but those who claim some degree of expertise, while disagreeing over precisely what it is and the likely causes, do apparently agree that the syndrome exists. Prof Simon Wessely is beyond the pale for some sufferers because of a perception on their part that he doesn’t allow the possibility of a physiological cause (edit: see comment below from Prof Wessely); Emeritus Prof Malcolm Hooper takes a contrary view to that of Prof Wessely. In a paper published last year, Dr Myhill summed up these two positions thus:

• Hypothesis (A) the metabolism of people with CFS is normal, but the fatigue and other symptoms are due to psychological factors.
• Hypothesis (B) there is a metabolic dysfunction with the result that not enough energy is being produced.

Sliding off the edge of reason at the angry sufferers end of the spectrum are the conspiraloons who see the GMC investigation into Dr Myhill as a ‘witch-hunt’, a view Dr Myhill shares. Unfortunately, the real and very important issues raised by the latest complaint are getting drowned in the the sea of nonsense spewed out by this vociferous group.

These are some of the reasons and views I have collected from different people who subscribe to the witch-hunt hypothesis:

• There are other people, procedures, practices and meds that harm people;
• This is the umpteenth complaint to the GMC about her;
• The complainant is anonymous;
• She helps people;
• She harms nobody;
• None of the previous complaints has come from patients and nor does this one;
• A person who genuinely had an issue with the website would complain to the  owner in the first instance

Let’s consider these in turn:

‘What about the other people, procedures, practices and meds that are harming people?’

The argument that if one cared about people’s health, one would be targetting things that really harm it, is made repeatedly by some of those supporting Dr Myhill so I’ll deal with it briefly. The fact that people have complained about Dr Myhill doesn’t mean they don’t care about anything else or that they are doing nothing about anything else. The only thing of importance we know about the complainants is that they made these particular complaints. Anything else is speculation and not an argument.

It’s the same point that gets made repeatedly to skeptics. “I wish you could find a space in your evidently caring heart for the thousands and thousands who die each year at the hands of ’scientific’ medicine, or don’t those matter?” said one commenter on this blog. In the interests of balance, I’ve been told, I should blog more about what they want to read and less about what I want to write. As if there weren’t enough people writing about the wrongs of scientific medicine already and as if my writing about it as well is going to make any difference to anything.

Anyway, back to the witch-hunt:

‘This is the umpteenth complaint to the GMC about her.’

There have been a number of previous complaints about Dr Myhill. These have all happened since she left the NHS and moved to private practice in 2000. I understand that all or most of these previous complaints concerned her recommendations on prescribing thyroid hormones. (I’m getting my information from her defence statement; I stand to be corrected if I’ve misunderstood.) The point is that these earlier complaints seem to be about something different from the latest two, which are different again from each other, though the common denominator is the allegation that some of what Dr Myhill says and does is potentially harmful.

Whereas, to a disinterested party, the fact that there have already been several complaints against her might set off alarm bells, to her supporters the important thing is that these previous complaints were unsuccessful. That there should be yet another complaint when there have been several unsuccessful ones already, confirms their darkest suspicions: Dr Myhill is being deliberately targeted by the GMC, who will use any excuse to stop her helping people. That previous unsuccessful complaints should serve as reason enough not to consider any more is a very curious argument, yet to her supporters it makes perfect sense. Look at the petition, for example,

We the undersigned wish to register our strong objections to the GMC (General Medical Council) over the witch hunt campaign to discredit Dr Sarah Myhill. This is the 6th time that Dr Myhill has been subjected to such a hearing and enough is enough!

That is one of the most idiotically-worded petitions I’ve ever seen and I don’t think I would sign a petition for someone I supported if it was worded like that.

Let’s say, for example, somebody I know and love keeps getting arrested and questioned for various crimes but none of the allegations stick. The sixth time he’s arrested I’m definitely thinking, ‘This isn’t fair. They’re just picking on him — what have they got against him? Who benefits from his conviction? They’ve never been able to prove anything against him — he’s obviously innocent’. This is somebody I know and love, right? I’m allowed, in my distress, to be irrational in my thinking.

Once I think about starting petitions and campaigns, however, I hope I’m going to run it past someone more objective than I’m capable of being in the circumstances. Hopefully I’ll realise that, even if he was innocent before, that doesn’t mean he’s innocent now; if a complaint has been made it still has to be investigated and an argument like ‘enough is enough’ isn’t, well, enough to not investigate it.

To an objective bystander like me, the idea that GMC members themselves are conducting a witch-hunt seems a bit silly. If someone submits a complaint, they can’t just say, “Flaming Norah! Not this woman again. Look, we’ve already thrown out a number of complaints about her already so let’s not waste time on any more.”

A bit more plausible is the idea that the complainants themselves are conducting a witch-hunt: a bunch of people don’t like someone so they take turns to make vexatious complaints to the employer, regulatory body or whatever. But why would they target a doctor that helps people and harms nobody? This is where we get the full chorus of cacophonous loony tunes.

After ‘Jonas’ announced on the Bad Science forum that he had complained about Dr Myhill, a vitriolic thread was started on Phoenix Rising, a ME/CFS forum, apparently for the purpose of hissing and spitting at posters on the Bad Science forum. The PR thread contains the usual nonsense about Big Pharma paying ‘shills’ to post on internet fora as well as some less than complimentary comments about Bad Science posters in general. The thread also contains this post on page 3:

As far as I am concerned this is Goldacre on a further a self destruction course. He is providing amo for the proposal I have made to report him and his website to the GMC. They have already set a precedent by taking a case against Dr Myhill. So let the junk and attacks continue on his site, save them, don’t reply and let them build their own case against themselves. We will just have to forward to the GMC. If this is not putting patients at risk as Dr Myhill was so pathetically accused I don’t know what is.

Thankyou Ben Goldacre for being the author of your own misfortune, yet again!!!

Can one fault the reasoning here? Ben Goldacre owns a website with a discussion forum and, athough he rarely posts there himself, he is responsible for everything said on it including any unpleasant comments about Dr Myhill, whether or not he personally expresses an opinion.

The idea that Ben Goldacre is somehow responsible for the latest complaint against Dr Myhill doesn’t stop with the Phoenix Rising ME/CFS forum. Take, for example, About.com’s Thyroid Disease Blog, authored by one Mary Shomom.

It is precisely because doctors like Sarah Myhill use successful approaches that are not part of the narrowly prescribed dogma that they are successful — but it seems that to the GMC, results and healthy, satisfied patients are less important than conformity.

So the GMC’s decision to pursue a case against Dr. Myhill raises a key question: who is the GMC actually trying to protect?

That is clear. The doctors on the GMC want to put her out of business. She is not part of the NHS, and she takes an integrative, holistic approach to treatment — which is an anathema to the old school NHS doctors. The GMC members are selfishly protecting themselves — their financial interests and their “status-quo treatment is best” egos — rather than protecting the health and safety of patient.

Have we got that straight? NHS doctors don’t like the “integrative, holistic approach to treatment”, so they want to ruin someone practising it outside of the NHS. There simply aren’t enough people queuing for treatments and using up the NHS’ finite resources already so they must stop those people from going to Dr Myhill after the NHS has failed them and bring them back and offer them more of the expensive but ineffective treatments they’ve tried already. Right, gotcha. I’m sure that is indeed why the complaints against Dr Myhill were made.

That Ben Goldacre is an NHS doctor who owns the Bad Science website is enough for Mary Shomom to write one of the most burningly stupid and gratuitous attacks on him I’ve ever seen. To show just how badly the stupid burns, here’s one sentence:

One also has to wonder whether Goldacre himself is actually the one who anonymously sent the complaint letter about Dr. Myhill as a publicity stunt to help sell books and get more media attention for himself.

Of course, writing an anonymous letter is exactly what you would do if you wanted publicity. Gah!

In the comments beneath the post (which include, by the way, some excellent comments in defence of Ben) we see evidence that the stupid is infectious in this gem:

The timing of this attack on Myhill from Goldacre’s site is interesting.

Goldacre doesn’t let on that he is “a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and is a research fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London.” (Wikipedia). “Trust me I’m a psychiatrist” doesn’t sound so good, does it?

Goldacre is supervised by Simon Wessely, who has built a career arguing CFS and GWI are psychiatric conditions, the opposite of what Myhill thinks. Now it’s turning out they are real physical ailments, not just maladaptive beliefs, so the shrinks are lashing out wildly at anyone in reach, as their ship sinks.

It has never before occurred to me that Ben Goldacre is ashamed of being a psychiatrist. I wonder who held a gun to his head and forced him take it up? Next time I hear Ben repeat his favourite catchphrase, “Trust me, I’m a doctor,” I’m going to call him on it. But the most important thing here is the uncovering of the Goldacre-Wessely connection. Wessely, remember, is despised by some CFS sufferers. The latest complainant is a registered user on the website forum that Ben owns. Voila! A link between Wesseley and the complainant is established and it’s obvious Goldacre is a key player — maybe even the instigator — of this evil mission to destroy Dr Myhill. As Mary Shomon says,

A quackbuster is a quackbuster — and in the end, quackbusters are NOT on the side of wellness or truth.

Note to readers: In case you missed it, every bit of my paragraph above is sarcastic. It’s what happens to me when I read things that are unutterably and irredeemably stupid and that would be my description of the “arguments” that there is some ulterior motive — and someone other than Jonas — behind the latest complaint against Dr Myhill.

The fact of the matter is they haven’t a clue why anyone would bother complaining about someone so wonderful and they are desperately making stuff up. The thought that people might complain because they genuinely think that she is giving dangerous advice and they are genuinely concerned about the effects this could have on people’s health, doesn’t enter their thick heads!

‘The complainant is anonymous.’

Anyway, whoever complained had better not walk out alone at night, or so one blogger would like him to fear. That would be Rita Pal, who presents herself as a heroic NHS whistle-blower, which she may well be, I’ve no idea. I only know that what she writes about the latest complainant makes her sound like a complete nutjob. First she — like Shomon and numerous other commenters — labours under the misapprehension that the complainant is anonymous.

Perhaps the big girls blouse will fight like a real man and stop “hiding behind the skirts of the GMC”. Of course, identification is really easy really, we get the IP, we get the internet company and we get the address. It is about a 48 hour job if I put my mind to it…There will be no problems in outing Dr /Mr Anonymous. After that, we will do what was done to Dr Tim Woodman. The matter was faxed to all local papers, to every PCT and posted on the internet. In the end, Timbo became depressed. I can’t help it if some doctors make vexatious complaints then can’t sustain it.

Then she offers to give advice to anyone who wants to make complaints about — you guessed it — Ben Goldacre to the GMC.

Just to remind Ben — I don’t like him messing with my friends…So far two of my friends have gone down due to the Bad Science Forums. Either Ben controls it or he doesn’t. The choice is his. I though am highly pissed off — and not a lot of people like it when I lose my patience.

Oh get over yourself, you silly moo! (The deliciously ironic title of this piece, by the way, calls the Bad Science forum ‘crackport farm’.)

Let’s remind ourselves that the complainant only posted on Bad Science after he’d submitted the complaint and after Dr Myhill had commented on it on her own website. The Bad Science forum is just a place where skeptics hang out, a bit like an on-line SitP but without the guest speakers. Instead, everyone who registers, regardless of whether they are good, bad or ugly, can say pretty much what they like. It’s called ‘free speech’. The suggestion that the complaint arises from the Bad Science forums or from anyone other than the complainant doesn’t stand up to a nanosecond’s scrutiny.

Good tip about the IP addresses though, Rita. Obviously, I have the IP addresses of all the lovely people who leave their quackolades on this blog. I’m sure a quick email to their internet service companies will secure their names and addresses for me in a jiffy. Beware when you answer your front door, losers. [/more sarcasm]

It’s time to nail this one: the complainant isn’t anonymous. The complainant’s name and address are known to the GMC, while we can infer from what Dr Myhill says in the letter she sent to supporters on 9th April  that she knows his name.

However, on the basis of this unsubstantiated complaint by an anonymous complainant (I am told his name but not who he is), the GMC have decided that “there is a potential risk to public safety”.

In her defence statement Dr Myhill elaborates:

I do understand and respect the complainant’s request for anonymity and have no desire to know his name or whereabouts. However I did wish to know whether he was acting out of personal concerns or if he was acting for a third party. I wanted to know this because in the past other practitioners of nutritional medicine have been harassed by investigative journalists.

On the Bad Science forum, Jonas mentions he’s a junior health professional.So if Jonas is a doctor or a nurse or a physiotherapist or a dietician, or even if he is an investigative journalist representing other interests, it makes what difference, exactly? None. What matters is whether the complaint has any merit, regardless of who filed it. (Edit: according to the hearing transcript Jonas is a UK registered Clinical Scientist.)

Dr Myhill’s supporters do her no favours by banging on about this being an anonymous complaint but, unfortunately, they are taking the lead from her in this as in everything else about the case. Dr Myhill has already made much of the original post Jonas made on the BS forum. She quotes from it on her webpage: ‘Our anonymous complainant has announced himself on the internet’ and again in her defence statement. In case her supporters had missed seeing it, she read it out in her speech to them outside the GMC yesterday. This can be seen on youtube, nearly five minutes in. “And I quote from what he put online verbatim!” she says, angrily, before reading out some of the post and making clear from her tone her contempt for its contents.

Notably, what is missing from each of her accounts of Jonas post, is the actual substance of his complaint, i.e. the links to the pages on her website that contain the (allegedly) harmful recommendations he has complained about. These have always been quite visible in the post and there would have been little point in his posting without them. They are what his complaint is all about, what he is inviting other posters to comment on and they are what the GMC is being asked to look at. Yet they are ignored by Dr Myhill, who appears to think there is some advantage to be gained by quoting the rest of his post ad nauseum and theatrically describing the GMC’s position on the complaint as

Setting my opinion against an anonymous observer and coming down on the side of anonymity.

And perhaps there is, if the intention is to divert attention away from the substance of the complaint and vilify the GMC by implying the complaint they have agreed to investigate is frivolous, unsubstantiated and anonymous.

‘Dr Myhill helps people, harms nobody and no patient has complained.’

Outside the GMC premises in Euston Road yesterday, dozens of Dr Myhill’s supporters gathered, some of them holding placards saying they owed their life to her, all of them angry at the way she is being treated. Many more supporters have posted vivid accounts on the internet of the desperation that drove them to turn to Dr Myhill and of the improvements they’ve made since being treated by her. Behind much of the anger at these complaints lies the fear that someone who is helping people who’ve suffered horribly with CFS may lose her licence and won’t be able to continue helping them or help others who are suffering.

I am not qualified to comment on the treatments Dr Myhill gives to CFS patients or to anyone else. Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that Dr Myhill has stumbled upon a treatment regime that really does help many sufferers. It would indeed be a terrible thing if she were not able to help them anymore. I am already desperately sorry if the restrictions placed on her yesterday mean that ill people will suffer.

I am equally sorry if anyone suffers as a result of misinformation on her website. I know it can be difficult to imagine that someone to whom you feel indebted can be guilty of anything but I’m sure you’re not too blinkered to acknowledge that the fact that she might be doing some things right doesn’t preclude the possibility that she’s doing other things wrong.

Hand in hand with the argument that she helps people, is the one that she’s done nobody any harm and none of the complaints against her comes from patients. I have to wonder if they are being deliberately obtuse when they say this. This is what Jonas says,

The complaint does not focus on matters of opinion that I may not agree with. It clearly identifies specific examples where, according to national guidance and safety limits, patients may be being placed at risk. It does not mention anything about any financial aspects of Dr Myhill’s practice. It does not target her approach to diagnosing/managing specific conditions such as thyroid disease or CFS.

The complaint focuses on what I consider to be specific examples of dangerous practice that are a risk to patient safety.

I can’t see a way of putting it any clearer. If someone can point to specific examples of advice given that contravenes national guidance and safety limits, these having been determined by the weight of scientific evidence available, how can it be wrong to complain about it?

I’ve heard a range of responses to this question, from ‘the complainant is wrong; the website content is scientifically supported’ to ‘the national guidance is wrong and Dr Myhill is right’ to ‘some of the stuff is quackish but it doesn’t post a significant risk to health’.

The vaccination pages

For all I know, there may be some truth in all of these responses. But I also believe there is substance to Jonas’ complaint and I defy anyone to actually examine the pages complained about (if they are still there) and say that there isn’t. I’ve limited my reading of Dr Myhill’s website to a few articles, mainly those on immunisation which, for reasons I won’t go into, is something I feel rather strongly about. What I’ve read is, in my humble opinion, indefensible.

On 18 April jdc wrote a blog post criticising Dr Myhill’s web article entitled, MMR vaccination — should my child have it? The following day the content of that page had been removed and replaced by this notice:

Update April 19th 2010

I have received several emails from authorative sources who tell me my information on vaccinations is out of date. Thank you very much for getting in contact! This page was originally based on a lecture which I attended in good faith!

I am grateful for new information that I will incorporate as soon as reasonably possible!

This would have seemed a very positive and gracious response, were it not for the fact that she directs readers to her main article on vaccinations: Vaccinations — good or bad? (See pdf here.) Someone influenced by the opinions expressed in this article wouldn’t have their child immunised against anything. The fact that she includes a ‘recommended schedule’ for some vaccinations at the end of the article doesn’t mitigate the strongly anti-vax message and (what I believe to be) misinformation throughout the rest of it.

In the speech she wrote for her supporters yesterday, Dr Myhill made this controversial claim.

Lynn Gilderdale who died from ME aged 28 had her ME triggered by a BCG vaccination.

Lynn got the BCG jab at age 14. How does Dr Myhill know that Lynn’s ME was triggered by the BCG vaccination? When she actually delivered the speech, Dr Myhill helpfully departed from the script, just very slightly. (See the youtube vid at 2:50)

Lynn Gilderdale who died from ME aged 28; her mother tells me her ME was triggered by a BCG vaccination.

Spot the difference? How can it be ethical to present the opinion of a grieving mother as if it were an established fact? (Let’s not bother talking about Lynn’s death “from ME” actually being death from an overdose of morphine in an assisted suicide. Her mother was acquitted of her attempted murder.)

Amongst Dr Myhill’s recommendations, by the way, are that babies receive no vaccinations before six months and are kept at home. Is this advice — which is, I’m sure, much appreciated by mothers whose live-in nannies can be persuaded or coerced into staying at home with the baby for six months  — an example of the “holistic approach” revered by Mary Shomon and others?

As Dr Myhill evidently sets so much store by anecdote, here’s one from me.

My first baby got his BCG jab in November 1984 at eight weeks of age. This was followed, shortly after, by the DPT — the latter, I would add, accompanied by huge anxiety on my part, thanks to anti-vax scaremongering at the time about the whooping cough vaccine. His sister got the same jabs two and a half years later.

Their father worked long hours leaving me to spend twelve hours of every day with the two of them and no help from anyone else. We lived in a small flat. If, in the interests of protecting their health, I hadn’t been able to take them both out to toddler groups, friends’ homes and suchlike, I’d have ended up killing both of them and myself, probably.

When the MMR was launched after a year in which 16 children in England/Wales had died of measles, I was banging on the door of the clinic to get it for my two. Fortunately they, like every one of their similarly immunised friends, grew into strong, healthy adults who — unlike me — never knew the miseries of feeling ill and lonely and missing weeks of school because of a series of loathesome infectious diseases, which left some children of my generation with permanent disabilities and others dead.

On the basis of my anecdotal experience, I’m tempted to recommend that all children get all the jabs my children had, starting with the BCG at eight weeks, though you may as well stick with what the NHS is saying nowadays.

I don’t intend to spend any time on what else I think may be wrong with Dr Myhill’s site. A lot of it is coming down anyway and there is another thread on BS where people are posting on this very topic, which brings me to a final argument from Dr Myhill’s supporters and from Dr Myers herself:

Why couldn’t the complainant just complain directly to Dr Myhill about the content of the website?

I have some sympathy with this. It would have given her the opportunity to either convince the complainant that all the website content is sound or to change the content so that it is accurate. Jonas, however, points out that:

These complaints date back to at least 2001 and yet she still continues to practise in the same way and offer the same inaccurate information that attracts all of this adverse attention? She could quite easily continue to help the CFS patients, to whom she is quite clearly a benefit, without promoting such misguided and dangerous practices.

This is precisely why I chose to complain to the GMC as I felt that personal communication would simply be futile. Why would she listen to a junior health professional with only a few years experience when she has repeatedly resisted multiple challenges from her senior peers over the course of 10 years? We would probably still be debating the intricacies of thyroid function assessment many years later whilst her dangerous information continued to mislead patients and risk their safety.

This, as an argument, I find altogether more persuasive than any of those presented by her supporters, most of which aren’t arguments at all. The most intelligent post from a CFS sufferer — and one whose calm reasoning contrasts starkly to many that I’ve seen — was posted by a newly registered poster at BS. Here it is in full, with bold added:

I feel a little silly now, although not altogether regretful, to admit that a couple of years ago I took the ATP test on Dr Myhill’s site and then took to ‘prescribed’ supplements including injecting B12 and Mag. Although reading through the ‘inaccuracies in Dr Myhill’s website’ thread has made me feel very naive for doing so. At the time I was so ill, and so desperate to find a/. a diagnostic test and b/. some kind of treatment, that I know in my heart of hearts that I put aside my analytical thinking for the sake of hope.

And that’s the point, when you are ill and looking for information and hope you try and find any authority to give it to you. For me, it did me no harm (apart from financial (which in so small matter actually)), in fact it helped, but that’s not the point — what if I had been a patient with lung cancer believing that medical treatments wouldn’t work and supplements would? Or a mother who now believed that putting my baby on her side (rather than her back) is good protection for cot death?

I think it is such a shame that we (as the ME community) can’t see that the complaint is about the inaccuracies in the website that a Doctor shouldn’t be putting forward, and not an attack on the validity of the illness. The problem is that it is very hard to want to see the flaws in Dr Myhill when she is one of the only doctors out there offering actual treatment for ME/CFS (founded, unfounded, or er..otherwise). We want to believe! We want hope, and that sometimes blinds you to really being unbiased when looking into to these things.

Which is why this forum and others like it are important.

I hope that Dr Myhill is able to continue helping CFS sufferers, that her pioneering work is fruitful and justifies the loyalty her supporters feel for her.  As for the possibility that they might stop thinking about themselves long enough to see the truth of the complaint about the website — after reading Dr Myhill’s speculation over why the GMC have imposed such “fierce and inappropriate sanctions“, I won’t be holding my breath.

Edited to add: I’ve just become aware of an old thread on facebook on Dr Myhill that makes for interesting reading.