Sir Roy Meadow guilty of using misleading data

[call me jaded]

GMC not yet decided whether this is gross misconduct.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4679113.stm

[Lucas]

His evidence was faulty-ish(as weak as his asserted statistic was, the arguements against it seem pretty weak themselves) but the issue is wether he had any good reason to believe it wasn't. I find it odd that he denies any misconduct, this means there is either important information which isn't being given enough attention and he is trying to draw attention to it, or he's crackers.

 

I think it says more about the courts than him. It should occur to anyone that if there even is a one in seventy-three million of two cot-deaths in a family, then it is almost certain that there will be at least one family that this has happened to and they may obviously be on trial purely because of the incredible improbability.

 

And I'm pretty sure it would not have been too difficult for the defense teams to find other experts to contradict Meadow's claims.

 

I am guessing that he will be cleared of misconduct with the other experts backing him up, the newspapers and media will be in an uproar and talk about what an outrage it is whilst not informing the public accurately of the reasons why Roy Meadow is innocent of misconduct.

[~Jonathan~]

He sent several innocent women to prison on faulty info, they can't have had it easy in there them being convicted child-murderers, it almost destroyed Angela Cannings marriage. In my opinion, whatever he gets won't be enough. If it were up to me, I'd have him struck off then I'd take him to every town square in England where he would be pelted with eggs and rotting fruit!

[admum]

Im with you on that one Jonathan.

[Lucas]

The innocence of some of them has actually been questioned since their release and they were only allowed to walk away on the basis of technicalities. I don't really have any idea who may be innocent of guilty.

 

It is not so simplistic as he giving faulty information, the arguements against his claim are suprisingly weak(they've suprised me).

 

I'm a little disturbed that they don't seem to be sure wether or not they should attack his method of coming up with the 72m to 1 statistic(by taking the chances of cot-death and then multiplying it by itself for two cot deaths). Maths is an exact science, the only real inarguable one in fact, so they know they are on shaky ground when challenging him on this. Instead they opt for attacking him on the basis that he didn't take into account genetic and other factors which make it more likely for a child to have cot death when an earlier sibling has.

 

That doesn't really sound like a very bad or severe case of misconduct, even an authority can not know everything and take it into account. The results it lead to were bad but the actual action itself was minor. But those results could have been avoided at any time and Meadow is not as entirely to blame as many are making out.

[~Jonathan~]

I can't speculate on who's innocent or guilty, if the women have been cleared and released then a decision has been made and it's to that I look. Let's take the worst case scenario and every woman involved is guilty, the fact still remains that Dr Meadows' information was dodgy, therefore he is in the wrong and should be punished accordingly. But try and imagine how those women felt, they were trying to come to terms with their babies dying (which is horrendous in itself) and added to that, they are being questioned over whether they in fact had anything to do with that, added to that they were tried and found guilty, added to that they were imprisoned. If they weren't guilty then he has to be struck off, simple as that really.

[Lucas]

It isn't as simple as that, as I said. What he did was very minor, what it led to was not, bit his actions were not the single most important factor in those women being sent to prison.

 

The only way he could have done anything seriously wrong is if he were to be challenged on his statistic calculation, but he hasn't, he's been challenged on not including obscure factors. If those factors were supposedly widely known, what was stopping the defense counsel easily finding an expert to contradict Roy Meadows in court?

 

And few of those woman have actually been cleared, merely aquitted on technicalities, not evidence. Some of those women may have really killed their children and the statistic Roy Meadow used is not intrinsically faulty. Meadow himself said that the relevance of his evidence should not be exaggerated, but it was and now he's getting blamed for it.

 

Some things I've noted which have explained a lot but are not obvious:

 

Meadow has not been charged with perverting the course of justice for some reason.

 

Doubts have since been raised about Sally Clark's innocence, but even with double jeopody now abolished, she is not going to be put on trial again excluding Meadow's evidence, so even without that statistic there could be enough evidence to prove her guilt anyway. If this happened it would visceraly give credit to Roy Meadow and someone obviously doesn't want that, probably the CPS who share a lot more of the blame than Meadow.

 

The big lie in all this is that Meadow's evidence was very important, but he warned against it's use and there is nothing at all wrong with the calculation he used. It was the duty of the defense to question it but they were obviously awful. If there was anything wrong with Meadow's evidence, it would not have been hard to find a person who knows.

[lorryw]

Roy meadows has been struck off by the GMC

[~Jonathan~]

I agree with everything you have written Lucas.

[call me jaded]

I suspect Sir Roy was very credible as a witness. This from the Telegraph in 2003 gives a good insight.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jh...02%2Fdo0202.xml

[Lucas]

Ah, that's cleared something up that wasn't being accurately represented before: his statistic was wrong because cot deaths are not random. I'm guessing though that is just an unproven theory(or there would already be a solution to cot death) and Roy Meadow saw that as reasonable grounds to discount it, but that may have been a big error on his part. As the article says, some expert witnesses may exclude anything that can possibly contradict their position.

 

I do think that the GMC may have shot itself in the foot by striking him off: the driving force in science is that scientists must make every effort to destroy their own and each others theories. If you discredit personally everyone who has a discredited theory, then there is no point having any scientists at all as anything they say will be mud and no advances will ever be made. Doctors in hospitals often get things wrong and peopel die but they are not struck off because even more people would suffer that way. You go into hospital and the chances are that many of the doctors dealing with serious injuries have caused deaths with understandable mistakes far from gross negligence.

 

I am thinking that Meadow has been struck off because of the publicity and a one-sided media portrayal(the doubts about some of the mothers innocence only appeared in very small boxes in the Guardian). What he actually did was quite minor and there was enough publicity at the time of each trial for someone to read what he said and say "That ain't right".

 

I did once think he shouldn't be an eminent anything after reading that he created the diagnosis for Manchausens by Proxy, which I thought was a quack diagnosis because one of the symptoms is denying you have it. Turns out that is misrepresented; what it really means is that a person with Manchausens by Proxy will over-react when confronted with any evidence of mistreatment or a slight suggestion(even unintentional) that the condition in their child is not as bad as they are making out. That puts a different angle on it.

 

I'm a bit more weary now about increasing over-zealous mechanations in the last few years to discredit the diagnosis and everyone associated with it.

[Suze]

Thought I should add in the case of Sally Clarke that evidence of a lung infection was left off one of her childrens autopsy reports , the clinician responsible for this was also disciplined.(I,m afraid I can,t remember the exact details but Sally lived not far from me and the autopsy etc was carried out at our local hospital our local news covered the story very thoroughly).I personally don,t think she was or is guilty.

[call me jaded]

It's all very well (possibly essential) to have some professional sparring and competition, but I suspect SRM was guilty of complacency in what had become quite a lucrative career for him. For that I think he needed to be struck off. Besides he's in his seventies, it's hardly cutting short a brilliant career.

 

The two other CPS expert medical witnesses have also been disciplined.

 

There is a website, Parents Protecting Children, which campaigns for wrongly accused parents.

 

http://www.parents-protecting-children.org.uk/

 

They are looking for people who have been wrongly accused of MSBP to take part in some research (look under News).

 

Being trained in Child Protection issues I have always taken the precaution of running whatever alternative therapies I do by my GP and get the go ahead ('It won't do him any harm'). When we start the GFCF diet my son became very withdrawn and tentative enquiries were made from his school (good for them!). I was able to say it was with my GP's consent and the matter was dropped. At his next annual review the school whole-heartedly endorsed the diet (I did not ask them to) and now encourages other parents to try.