Dr MyHill's License in Jeopardy

[Cort]

Apparently the purveyors of conservatism are after Dr. Myhill and her license is in jeopardy. I just got this in an email. UK patients, in particular, could make a difference here.

Dr Sarah Myhill MB BS, Upper Weston, Llangunllo, Knighton, Powys, UK LD7 1SL

Tel:01547550331 Fax:01547550339

E-mailffice@doctormyhill.co.uk Website:www.drmyhill.co.uk

_____________________________________________________________________________

Friday April 9th
Dear All

Re: The GMC is about to withdraw my licence to practice
On Thursday April 8th 2010 at 10am I was ordered by the GMC to attend a Hearing in Manchester on Monday April 12th with a view to withdrawing my licence to practice (Case Reference: PB/C1-314994282). One week ago I received a complaint about my website, to which I have yet to reply. 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. There are no specific allegations, I am not being allowed to defend myself against any such allegations, I may have to wait a further 18 months for such a hearing when my licence could then be restored, i.e. I am presumed guilty until I can prove my innocence. This is the opposite to normal English law.

No patient has complained, no patient has been harmed and no patient has been put at any risk of harm. However, should I lose my licence, patients will certainly be put at risk of harm; partly because they will be denied access to medication essential to their well being, partly because they will lose access to tests and partly because I will be unable to support patients in applications for DLA and other such medico-legal issues.

I have applied for a postponement on the grounds that the time scale is too short for me to appoint representation. The GMCs normal practice is to give doctors seven days notice.

PLEASE HELP! By
*Emailing the GMC on pbridge@gmc-uk.org Case Reference: PB/C1-314994282
*Telephoning Mr Paul Bridge on 0161 923 6417
*Faxing Mr Adam Elliott on 0207 189 5177
*Post to Mr Paul Bridge, General Medical Council, 3 Hardman St, Manchester M3 3AW

To say:
That you find the website a helpful source of information;
That your health will be put at risk if you are unable to avail yourself of my services as a doctor;
Request to attend a future Fitness to Practice Hearing to give evidence that you have been helped by information from my website.

Ask the GMC to acknowledge your concerns.

If my licence is withdrawn then I will continue to practise within the limitations laid down by the GMC. In reality my advice to patients will be unchanged, but I shall not be so empowered as to put in place all the interventions that so many patients have found helpful! Please, fight alongside me. I have to remain cool, calm, and collected in my dealings with the GMC, but you can get angry and emotional so please do! I will keep you all updated on my website.

Best wishes,

Sarah Myhill

Update afternoon of April 9th the GMC have now postponed this initial Hearing to April 29th. Again I shall be asking them to postpone and will keep you all posted on the website.

 

[leelaplay]

Guilty until proven innocent, with 1 1/2 business day's notice because of an annonymous website complaint?????? How absolutely outrageous.

I'm glad the hearing was postponed until April 29.

Good luck all you UKers. Do you think it would be helpful for people from other countries to email?

Sarah Myhill

Update afternoon of April 9th – the GMC have now postponed this initial Hearing to April 29th. Again I shall be asking them to postpone and will keep you all posted on the website.

 

[Dr. Yes]

Do you think it would be helpful for people from other countries to email?

Good question. Do you know, Cort? Or can anyone from the UK find out?

 

[Wayne]

Holy moly, what absurdity! I hope Richvank sees this and offers his articulate, reasoned voice to this situation. I know he's very supportive of Dr. Myhills' work, and could likely give some very sound scientific reasons as to why her protocol(s) is able to help so many people.

 

[Tammie]

How horrible - Dr Myhill is one of the CFS heroes out there.....if anyone knows if support from people outside the UK will help, definitely let us know

 

[Frickly]

UGGGGGGGG! If those of us from the U.S. can help I certaily will. What can we do. Can we find a talented writer and start a petition? This would make it easier for many who do not have the energy to write.

 

[ukme]

She has made a really big difference to us, I will try as best I can to help out here. Heaven knows we have few enough doctors on our side here in the Uk.

 

[spindrift]

Anyone have an idea how those in the US can help her?

 

[Alexia]

This is really AMAZING! how can they do such a thing! I'm not in the UK but I will certainly write an email explaining how much Dr. MyHill helps people and how important her website is for people with ME.
Thanks Cort for posting it here so we can at least write an email and try to support dr. Myhill.

 

[Countrygirl]

This is the second time that the GMC have tried to remove her license. They seem very determined. The GMC do appear to persecute the doctors who are brave enough to help us.

 

[fred]

This is the second time that the GMC have tried to remove her license. They seem very determined. The GMC do appear to persecute the doctors who are brave enough to help us.

Last time, they dropped the case and, if my memory serves me (which it rarely does these days), she was never able to find out why.

How ironic that the GMC cleared all the doctors involved in the Sophia Mirza case of any wrong-doing.

Just to repeat Sarah's request from post #1.

PLEASE HELP! By
*Emailing the GMC on pbridge@gmc-uk.org Case Reference: PB/C1-314994282
*Telephoning Mr Paul Bridge on 0161 923 6417
*Faxing Mr Adam Elliott on 0207 189 5177
*Post to Mr Paul Bridge, General Medical Council, 3 Hardman St, Manchester M3 3AW

To say:
That you find the website a helpful source of information;
That your health will be put at risk if you are unable to avail yourself of my services as a doctor;
Request to attend a future Fitness to Practice Hearing to give evidence that you have been helped by information from my website.

Ask the GMC to acknowledge your concerns.

 

[liverock]

The GMC have had it in for Dr Myhill for the last 8 years which culminated in a complaint from 5 doctors and a hearing was supposed to be heard in 2007.(See link below)

However due to the volume of letters received from patients of Dr Myhill, the GMC was forced to back down and withdraw the charges.

This shows that there was very little substance in the charges then and if pressurised these people will back down. I think it is important that anybody whether in the UK or anywhere in the world who have found help from Dr Myhill's protocol, or advice, make their feelings known (in a a respectful and intelligent manner). If we dont fight for one of the very few doctors in the UK who has dedicated herself to to helping CFS sufferers, this could end up being used by the GMC as a precedent for banning anybody not using the standard psychiatric model of treatment.

http://www.generalmedicalcouncil.com/2008/09/gmcs-witch-hunting-season-continues-top.html

 

[Nina]

So it's ok to abandon patients, to mistreat them and let them die but not to help them with everything one has to offer?

I'd say, let's not wait for a reply if it makes sense for the international community to voice our complaints, let's just do it! I am sure it will have SOME effect.

How come so many patients complain about Drs like Weasely and the likes and nothing ever happens to them? This sounds more than a little suspicious to me.

Let's all write and phone in NOW. We cannot let them take the few good docs we have!

 

[pollycbr125]

hi all ive posted about this on several facebook ME/CFS groups i have also set up a group to show support for Dr Myhill please join http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=108048875899603&ref=mf . If you are a patient of Dr Myhill's or use her website for reference please post your stories or if you just want to send a message of thanks or support .The more members we get obviously the louder our voice will be heard . If its Dr Myhill they are targetting now who will it be next .We need all the help we can get here in the UK Dr Myhill is one of the few who offers that. thankyou

 

[oerganix]

So it's ok to abandon patients, to mistreat them and let them die but not to help them with everything one has to offer?

I'd say, let's not wait for a reply if it makes sense for the international community to voice our complaints, let's just do it! I am sure it will have SOME effect.

How come so many patients complain about Drs like Weasely and the likes and nothing ever happens to them? This sounds more than a little suspicious to me.

Let's all write and phone in NOW. We cannot let them take the few good docs we have!

Agreed. I suggest we all, from all over the world, let them know that the world is watching them. Let them know that we are aware that the government medical establishment has sold out to the psych/Wessely school and that we are on to them. This is obviously a political manuever and requires a political response.

I have sent this email:
The whole world is watching you as you persecute one of the few doctors who have the compassion and expertise to actually treat the medical condition of ME/CFS sufferers in UK.

We have been watching as you allow the denialists of the biological facts of ME/CFS to dominate the field. The whole world knows how you let the psych lobby imprison Sophia Mizra in a mental institution because she was too sick to accept the torture the psych lobby has put in place (GET/CBT) to treat this physical illness.

In essence, you killed her.

How many more do you hope to eliminate by removing the expertise and support of Dr Myhill? How much money do you save by driving people to suicide as you have done for so long?

What has happened to "First, do no harm?" Have you no medical ethics left?

This case is politically motivated and will have a political solution. Please give Dr Myhill back to the thousands of ME/CFS sufferers who depend on her and persecute her no more.

The whole world is watching.

 

[paddygirl]

Dr Myhill on Prohealth

Agreed. I suggest we all, from all over the world, let them know that the world is watching them. Let them know that we are aware that the government medical establishment has sold out to the psych/Wessely school and that we are on to them. This is obviously a political manuever and requires a political response.

I've just been on Prohealth.com which has an article by Dr Myhill. It's basically a 'roadmap' for improving your health when suffering from ME/CFS.

At the very end - I think section 5 - she warns against 'quacks' targeting people desperate for help and relief from their symptoms. Included in the same paragraph is advice against trying psychological treatments until all accepted tests and and treatments have been carried out.

I think that she has royally p****d off some powerful people. Smells like a vendetta to me.

Sorry for not including the link, not too savvy with this stuff.

 

[Frank]

this is horrible

 

[Chris]

Dr Myhill

I have just sent this email: it may sound a bit pompous, but there may be times when this is not so inappropriate--just hope it does not sound absurd!
Dear Mr. Bridge,
I write upon hearing the news that the GMC has summoned Dr. S. Myhill to a hearing, initially with only one free business day notice, now I believe with somewhat more time, upon receiving one complaint; the charge apparently is the "potential risk to public safety" posed by her website. I am appalled at this latest evidence of the state of things in English medicine these days, with of course particular reference to the treatment of M.E. I write as one who grew up in England, and got his B.A. from Oxford in 1954; I have since grown a Ph.D. from Toronto, and taught at McGill University until my retirement in 1995. I developed M.E., or as we call it over here, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, in 2007. I write to try to make you more aware of how things look to an educated, intelligent observer in Canada.
I have followed events in England quite closely, and am simply appalled at the treatment accorded to M.E. in your country, based on the clearly fallacious and specious view that it is of psychological origin, and must (no other treatment is recognized) be treated by the deadly combination of GE and CBT. This "treatment" and "diagnosis" will in time--and quite soon, I believe and hope--be viewed as yet another in the list of atrocities perpetrated by the psychiatric lobby, ranking in absurdity with the Freud / Fliess "nasal reflex neurosis" treatment that did poor brave Emma Eckstein so much damage. Dr. Wessely has taken command of the treatment options, and from our perspective over here his time will surely come to a fairly rapid end, since his colleague in mischief in the US, Dr. William Reeves, has left (or been dismissed from --we do not know which) the dept he headed at the Centre for Disease Control in the US, which set back serious research into M.E. / CFS by nearly 20 years.
The doctors directly responsible for the miserable death of Sophia Mizra in a psychiatric hospital were freed of all charges; Dr. S. Myhill, one of the few rays of hope for sufferers of this disease in England, is being summoned to appear upon a single complaint by an unidentified caller, with the charge that her website constitutes a "risk to public safety." This is absurd. That website is one of the very few sources in the UK of up-to-date information and help on how to diagnose and treat M.E. It is a conduit for the serious research being done upon the condition by real doctors and researchers in the UK and the US, and in addition she has collaborated with other researchers in England to produce the invaluable new information contained in their joint paper on mitochondrial dysfunction in M.E., which led to a test for such dysfunction that I would take, in spite of the expense and difficulty, if it were still available to patients outside the UK. Dr. S. Myhill has been doing her best to help patients in desperate need of real knowledge and sound advice; the removal of her services and her website would be another devastating blow to M.E. sufferers in the UK, who have suffered more than enough already.
The refusal of the psychiatric lobby to even look at the evidence is frightening; much real clinical evidence was, for instance, presented at the Invest in ME International Conference in London in 2009, and an invitation was extended to Dr. Wessely to attend; he declined. At some point the wall will come down, the Stalinist control and exclusion will dissolve, and real research will win over hard fisted dogma; but how much more suffering will be inflicted before that happens? And I would not want to be on the receiving end of the outpouring of anger and dismay that will arise when the true state of affairs is finally open to view. Government papers locked from view for 70-or is it 80--years, persecution of the few doctors who bravely try to bring a little light into a dark scene, persecution of desperately ill patients, when will it stop?
We in Canada suffer too--there is only a small handful of doctors who know and understand the disease; but we do not suffer from this kind of zealous persecution and defence of hard and quite unjustified positions that make the scene in England look so awful to an outside observer. Please alter the way in which the GMC operates in cases like this, please remove the Stalinist, Orwellian atmosphere in which people like Dr. Myhill work; this is not the intelligent, tolerant, compassionate England in which I grew up from 1935 to 1955.
Sincerely, Dr. Christopher Heppner ( chris.heppner@shaw.ca ).

 

[leelaplay]

Okay - so I guess we all email. Is the MECFS action email running again yet - this would be good for it.

Just to repeat Sarah's request from post #1.

PLEASE HELP! By
*Emailing the GMC on pbridge@gmc-uk.org Case Reference: PB/C1-314994282
*Telephoning Mr Paul Bridge on 0161 923 6417
*Faxing Mr Adam Elliott on 0207 189 5177
*Post to Mr Paul Bridge, General Medical Council, 3 Hardman St, Manchester M3 3AW

To say:
That you find the website a helpful source of information;
That your health will be put at risk if you are unable to avail yourself of my services as a doctor;
Request to attend a future Fitness to Practice Hearing to give evidence that you have been helped by information from my website.
AND
Ask the GMC to acknowledge your concerns.

Again I shall be asking them to postpone and will keep you all posted on the website.
http://www.drmyhill.co.uk/

 

[*GG*]

Hope this does not start happening in the US with our Health Care "reform".