Once again it comes down to the issue of vaccine safety. If you want to find a sure way to lose your license to practice medicine just talk about vaccination's triggering disease. It's Dr. Wakefield all over again. Who's going to be next.
Dr MyHill's License in Jeopardy
- Thread starter Cort
- Start date
Of the people I know, in any emails to the GMC registering our objection we made sure to request the live feed. Something along the lines of..."As I am in [insert country] I request to send a proxy in my place or arrange a video linkup to attend a future Fitness to Practice Hearing to give evidence".
I understand people from UK have been asking to be informed of what time the hearing is so they can attend, or have been booking seats to attend (though these are booked out!) so I guess as an extension of that, as we overseas can't physically attend, we've been asking to be able to attend via live feed and/or be able to give evidence via video link.
If people have already written previously it still seems reasonable to write again and request a live feed for international supporters. Dr M does have patients overseas too.
Since the GMC are allegedly so interested in 'justice' they should bend over backwards to make everything about this situation transparent.
spindrift
Plays With Voodoo Dollies
- Messages
- 286
- Messages
- 165
Thanks for all your help guys.
Unbelievable.
x
Unbelievable.
x
Ah, that explains it. She used the v-word. That makes total sense. Goldacre is pivotal. All well worth further investigation.
The fault line seems to run through the vaccine issue. Now I'm led there too, against all my expectations, by the finding that animal retroviruses can contaminate specific batches of vaccine culture cells (paper referenced in the library showing this in animals, somewhere...), and that screening of vaccines wouldn't pick this up. Perfectly feasible therefore that retroviruses get into vaccine batches and cause localised issues, maybe either years down the line or immediately. A most convenient explanation for all the mysteries about clusters as well, like why it was only the doctors and nurses who got ME in the Royal Free Hospital outbreak - were they all vaccinated from the same batch at some point? Seems likely. Also: the anti-vaccine lobby has been focusing on lots of issues, like thimerosol, but perhaps the establishment found those links didn't hold up because they were really looking at the wrong thing - contamination of specific batches by retrovirus (not previously suggested by anti-vaccine lobby I believe, at least not the focus) could explain why any study finding a link would not be replicated in follow-up studies. Also a 'valid' reason to cover it up if you believe, based on a utilitarian attitude, that it's better to lie and keep confidence in vaccines and deal with the issue out of sight of the public.
All seems quite compelling to me, perhaps not based on science as evidence, nor on pure logic, but really because as a storyteller, in the hunt for a narrative that brings all the strands together and makes sense of all the mysteries, this, like XMRV, is a piece in the jigsaw that just makes everything fit. Doesn't mean it's right, but means it's well worth looking at carefully.
If only we could all share our vaccination histories and symptoms and find clusters, now that'd blow the lid off...
Dr Sarah Myhill is threatened with suspension:
http://www.drmyhill.co.uk/wiki/Category:My_GMC_Hearing
please sign the petition:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/w...drsarahmyhill/
and write a letter supporting her to:
pbridge@gmc-uk.org
This can definitely work to our advantage. If this fact was made public it would be deeply embarrassing to the GMC. Someone needs to inform the press that the origin of this complaint was some guy on the internet trying to impress his friends in a sceptics forum.
the post that 'jonas' wrote , starting with the words 'it's funny' and going on to say that he made the complaint in his coffee break appears to have been removed from the forum
Daisymay
Senior Member
- Messages
- 754
Thank you Dr Donnica.
You can read what Martin Walker says about Ben Goldacre here:
http://www.slingshotpublications.com/dwarfs.html
His book "Cultural Dwarfs" can be downloaded free, I haven't read it yet but doing a find and replace Simon Wessely's name comes up a lot.
carolwxyz99
Senior Member
- Messages
- 114
And there is this article about the book
http://homeopathy4health.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/goldacres-conflicts-of-interest-exposed/
Homeopathy4health
2 January 2008
Goldacre’s conflicts of interest exposed.
Filed under: Ben Goldacre, Homeopathy, Positive Science, alternative health, bad science, medicine, politics, pseudoscience, sceptic, scientism, very bad science — homeopathy4health @ 10:25 pm
Tags: bad science, Ben Goldacre, EMF, Gulf War Syndrome, Homeopathy, labour, ME, MMR, Patrick Holford, politics, scientism, The Guardian, very bad science, wi-fi
Cultural Dwarfs and Junk Journalism by Martin J Walker: free download available at www.slingshotpublications.com
Dr Ben Goldacre is the author of the Guardian’s Bad Science column and has authored ‘A Kind of Magic?’, in which:
“he produced what might appear to be a thoroughgoing, devastating critique of a bogus therapy, but the article is at best a farrago of truth, half-truth and downright dissembling. Given the lengths that the Guardian and other British newspapers go to be apparently objective on any vaguely radical subject, one can’t help wondering why the Guardian is happy to let Goldacre romp through, and tread down, all previous standards of fair debate.
Broadly speaking, the essay that follows is the latest addition to my ongoing analysis of the British corporate science lobby and its popular campaigning arms, skeptics and quackbusters. Specifically, the essay focuses on attacks on Patrick Holford, the independent nutritionist, while trying to place the quackbusting journalist Ben Goldacre, who began this round of attacks, in a social and political context.
Dr Ben Goldacre rarely draws attention to the fact that he is a medical doctor, nor does he ever discuss, even in the most general terms, patients with whom he has come into contact, in the way that, for example, James Le Fanu does in his intelligent Sunday Telegraph column. In fact, nothing Goldacre says seems to be grounded in everyday life, the condition of ‘ordinary people’ or the public at large.
Despite claiming to spend most of his life working in the NHS, he is circumspect about which London hospital he works in and what kind of medicine he practises. For someone who spends considerable amounts of time criticising those who practice non-allopathic medicine, for example nutritional practitioners, he might, one would think, make more of his NHS position.
Despite his claim to be a serious academician, and despite the fact that a number of his PR puffs say that he ‘has published academic papers in neuroscience’, there is no record on the significant databases of his having co-authored more than one academic paper, apparently written while he was a visitor at Milan University. The only way in which academic status can be measured is by the number of peer-reviewed papers or other notable publications such as books. It should
be pointed out that the engorgement of un-provable academic credentials is one of the major points of criticisms he addresses when writing his quackbusting articles.
QUACKBUSTER OR JOURNALIST: DOES BEN GOLDACRE HAVE CONFLICT OF INTERESTS?
In 1999, two years after New Labour had come to power and Lord Sainsbury had been rewarded for his campaign donations, Goldacre was funded by the British Academy to do his Masters degree in philosophy at King’s College.
Today, the British Academy (BA) is funded by the Office of Science and Innovation (OSI), which sits within the DTI.28 In the past it has always been linked to both the Royal Society and the Royal
Institution. It claims to ‘maximise the contribution made by our science, engineering and technology skills and resources to the UK’s economic development, and to the quality of our lives’. Of course, one is bound to wonder how the quality of public life could be enhanced by Ben Goldacre gaining an MA in philosophy.
King’s College is the bastion and training ground for The Lobby. It is where Simon Wessely, the premier master of scientific spin, resides, working, mad-professor-like on endless projects to prove that organic environmental illness does not exist, and that anyone who suggests it does is deluded.
The most empathetic and forgiving of us were imagining that Ben was a junior doctor in a heavily pressed casualty unit in an inner City area. If Ben was dealing with the dirty life and death of motor accidents, shootings and drug-related deaths in north-east London for example, perhaps he might be forgiven his hard bitten views, and his anti airy-fairy concerns about people affected by electric air waves, chemicals and bad vaccines.
It appears, however, that he has always been a post-grad clinical research worker, now possibly studying for a Phd at King’s College, the home of the psychiatric school of ‘all-in-the-mind aetiology’. In all probability Goldacre has been at this University Hospital since taking his MA, and was probably attached to it when he was taken on by the Guardian.
If this is the case, most probably he doesn’t see patients, except when he passes them in the corridor at the Maudsley as he makes his way to the Liaison Psychiatry Unit within the Institute of Psychiatry,where he is studying under the Prince of Spin Professor Simon Wessely, the head of the Liaison Psychiatry Department. Wessely is an advisor to the Science Media Centre and on the Advisory panel of the US American Council on Science and Health, one of the most heavily funded pro industry lobby groups in the world.
The really good thing about Liaison psychiatry is that you can blend all kinds of social issues with lots of mad-cap psychiatric ideas that work well for industry. Liaison psychiatry is a form of psychiatry in which the psychiatrist informs unsuspecting ordinary citizens who report to hospitals with organic illnesses that they are actually mentally ill. This diagnostic ability is particularly acute when the Liaison psychiatrist meets up with anyone who has suffered an environmental illness, a chemical insult, or any industry-related illness.
For some time now, King’s College has been deeply involved in the programme of spin designed by industry and the New Labour government. However, as is evident from the involvement of Goldacre there, the relationship between The Lobby, the University and the hospital, is not simple. As well as Wessely’s role, ex-Revolutionary Communist Party members have also played a part in bringing vested interests to the college. Together with pseudo-scientific research into mental illness and environmentally caused illness, King’s is deeply involved in risk analysis for various controvertial environmental factors.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST?
Can there be any doubt that the industry directed research at King’s, with which Goldacre is associated, or his association with Professor Wessely, whose research on ME, Gulf War Syndrome and EMF never benefits patients but always government or industry, constitutes a conflict of interest that should from the beginning have been declared by Goldacre, every time he says anything about science in the Guardian
or anywhere else?”
http://homeopathy4health.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/goldacres-conflicts-of-interest-exposed/
Homeopathy4health
2 January 2008
Goldacre’s conflicts of interest exposed.
Filed under: Ben Goldacre, Homeopathy, Positive Science, alternative health, bad science, medicine, politics, pseudoscience, sceptic, scientism, very bad science — homeopathy4health @ 10:25 pm
Tags: bad science, Ben Goldacre, EMF, Gulf War Syndrome, Homeopathy, labour, ME, MMR, Patrick Holford, politics, scientism, The Guardian, very bad science, wi-fi
Cultural Dwarfs and Junk Journalism by Martin J Walker: free download available at www.slingshotpublications.com
Dr Ben Goldacre is the author of the Guardian’s Bad Science column and has authored ‘A Kind of Magic?’, in which:
“he produced what might appear to be a thoroughgoing, devastating critique of a bogus therapy, but the article is at best a farrago of truth, half-truth and downright dissembling. Given the lengths that the Guardian and other British newspapers go to be apparently objective on any vaguely radical subject, one can’t help wondering why the Guardian is happy to let Goldacre romp through, and tread down, all previous standards of fair debate.
Broadly speaking, the essay that follows is the latest addition to my ongoing analysis of the British corporate science lobby and its popular campaigning arms, skeptics and quackbusters. Specifically, the essay focuses on attacks on Patrick Holford, the independent nutritionist, while trying to place the quackbusting journalist Ben Goldacre, who began this round of attacks, in a social and political context.
Dr Ben Goldacre rarely draws attention to the fact that he is a medical doctor, nor does he ever discuss, even in the most general terms, patients with whom he has come into contact, in the way that, for example, James Le Fanu does in his intelligent Sunday Telegraph column. In fact, nothing Goldacre says seems to be grounded in everyday life, the condition of ‘ordinary people’ or the public at large.
Despite claiming to spend most of his life working in the NHS, he is circumspect about which London hospital he works in and what kind of medicine he practises. For someone who spends considerable amounts of time criticising those who practice non-allopathic medicine, for example nutritional practitioners, he might, one would think, make more of his NHS position.
Despite his claim to be a serious academician, and despite the fact that a number of his PR puffs say that he ‘has published academic papers in neuroscience’, there is no record on the significant databases of his having co-authored more than one academic paper, apparently written while he was a visitor at Milan University. The only way in which academic status can be measured is by the number of peer-reviewed papers or other notable publications such as books. It should
be pointed out that the engorgement of un-provable academic credentials is one of the major points of criticisms he addresses when writing his quackbusting articles.
QUACKBUSTER OR JOURNALIST: DOES BEN GOLDACRE HAVE CONFLICT OF INTERESTS?
In 1999, two years after New Labour had come to power and Lord Sainsbury had been rewarded for his campaign donations, Goldacre was funded by the British Academy to do his Masters degree in philosophy at King’s College.
Today, the British Academy (BA) is funded by the Office of Science and Innovation (OSI), which sits within the DTI.28 In the past it has always been linked to both the Royal Society and the Royal
Institution. It claims to ‘maximise the contribution made by our science, engineering and technology skills and resources to the UK’s economic development, and to the quality of our lives’. Of course, one is bound to wonder how the quality of public life could be enhanced by Ben Goldacre gaining an MA in philosophy.
King’s College is the bastion and training ground for The Lobby. It is where Simon Wessely, the premier master of scientific spin, resides, working, mad-professor-like on endless projects to prove that organic environmental illness does not exist, and that anyone who suggests it does is deluded.
The most empathetic and forgiving of us were imagining that Ben was a junior doctor in a heavily pressed casualty unit in an inner City area. If Ben was dealing with the dirty life and death of motor accidents, shootings and drug-related deaths in north-east London for example, perhaps he might be forgiven his hard bitten views, and his anti airy-fairy concerns about people affected by electric air waves, chemicals and bad vaccines.
It appears, however, that he has always been a post-grad clinical research worker, now possibly studying for a Phd at King’s College, the home of the psychiatric school of ‘all-in-the-mind aetiology’. In all probability Goldacre has been at this University Hospital since taking his MA, and was probably attached to it when he was taken on by the Guardian.
If this is the case, most probably he doesn’t see patients, except when he passes them in the corridor at the Maudsley as he makes his way to the Liaison Psychiatry Unit within the Institute of Psychiatry,where he is studying under the Prince of Spin Professor Simon Wessely, the head of the Liaison Psychiatry Department. Wessely is an advisor to the Science Media Centre and on the Advisory panel of the US American Council on Science and Health, one of the most heavily funded pro industry lobby groups in the world.
The really good thing about Liaison psychiatry is that you can blend all kinds of social issues with lots of mad-cap psychiatric ideas that work well for industry. Liaison psychiatry is a form of psychiatry in which the psychiatrist informs unsuspecting ordinary citizens who report to hospitals with organic illnesses that they are actually mentally ill. This diagnostic ability is particularly acute when the Liaison psychiatrist meets up with anyone who has suffered an environmental illness, a chemical insult, or any industry-related illness.
For some time now, King’s College has been deeply involved in the programme of spin designed by industry and the New Labour government. However, as is evident from the involvement of Goldacre there, the relationship between The Lobby, the University and the hospital, is not simple. As well as Wessely’s role, ex-Revolutionary Communist Party members have also played a part in bringing vested interests to the college. Together with pseudo-scientific research into mental illness and environmentally caused illness, King’s is deeply involved in risk analysis for various controvertial environmental factors.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST?
Can there be any doubt that the industry directed research at King’s, with which Goldacre is associated, or his association with Professor Wessely, whose research on ME, Gulf War Syndrome and EMF never benefits patients but always government or industry, constitutes a conflict of interest that should from the beginning have been declared by Goldacre, every time he says anything about science in the Guardian
or anywhere else?”
For those who have actually managed to get a seat at the hearing this is where the hearing will be held. Looks like they only normally provide seating for 10 onlookers.
http://www.gmc-uk.org/concerns/witnesses/london.asp
http://www.gmc-uk.org/concerns/witnesses/london.asp
carolwxyz99
Senior Member
- Messages
- 114
Does anyone know more about the links between Wessely and Goldacre apart from the Martin Walker book?
fred
The game is afoot
- Messages
- 400
Reply from the GMC
Has anyone received a written reply from the GMC yet? I have received this.
[Quote starts]
Thank you for your e-mail addressed to Mr Niall Dickson, expressing your support for Dr Myhill. Mr Dickson has asked me to respond on his behalf.
Regrettably, we are unable to provide the information requested as to do so would be a breach of confidentiality and a breach of our disclosure policy. I appreciate that youre anxious we take on board your comments about Dr Myhill and her practice and I will ensure your email is passed to the IOP. Your comments will also be seen by our case examiners who ultimately will be the ones to decide upon the outcome of the complaints.
Thank you for taking the time to share your views with us.
Fiona Garry
Investigation Manager
FPD
Has anyone received a written reply from the GMC yet? I have received this.
[Quote starts]
Thank you for your e-mail addressed to Mr Niall Dickson, expressing your support for Dr Myhill. Mr Dickson has asked me to respond on his behalf.
Regrettably, we are unable to provide the information requested as to do so would be a breach of confidentiality and a breach of our disclosure policy. I appreciate that youre anxious we take on board your comments about Dr Myhill and her practice and I will ensure your email is passed to the IOP. Your comments will also be seen by our case examiners who ultimately will be the ones to decide upon the outcome of the complaints.
Thank you for taking the time to share your views with us.
Fiona Garry
Investigation Manager
FPD