Thread 15: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

The Observer's original exposé: The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...

The 14 Observer items currently available on their online 'The real Salt Path' page: The real Salt Path | The Observer

4 more from The Observer:
‘Hope is extinguished’: CBD patients respond to Salt Path...

The real Salt Path | The Observer (The Slow Newscast)

(Live/online event)

The Observer YouTube Channel: The Observer UK - YouTube

Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement: Raynor Winn

Thread One ^www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5368194-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?^

Threads 2-11: Links all in the OP of Thread 12

Thread 12: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5384574-thread-12-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Thread 13: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5386458-thread-13-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Thread 14: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5388981-thread-14-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

New posters joining us in the genuine spirit of our civil discourse welcome. It would be helpful to get the background from at least some of the Observer items above before posting. There are currently a number of interesting items on The Observer website and linked to above.

To all - Please be extremely cautious when it comes to naming or implicating people and addresses not in the public eye or with no direct connection to the story, and around the understandable health speculations, especially where details are unclear or still emerging. Remember, even Hollywood rabbits attract the odd flea. Please do not engage with visitors who seem to have their own agenda and seek to derail. Avoid @'ing and quoting them as - from experience - this will only encourage them back to the threads. We have done amazingly well together for fourteen very interesting, very serious and very silly threads so far. I can't be here as much as I'd like so all help with keeping our discussion walking along in our usual reasonable and respectful fashion is very welcome.

#Pinchofsaltpath
#Fudge
#Cider
#OurChloe
#OurSimon
#Correspondents
#Salray
#Timmoth
#MistakesWereMade
#EmbellishedBollox
#JustBollox
#DriveByScolding
#Glumwashing
#ThereBeSharks
#Scones
#NakedHikers
#TurquoiseGString
#BudleighSalterton
#SallyForth
#YesItReallyIsThread15
#Rabbits

Keep to the path. No saltiness. May the fudge be with you.

@Catwith69lives to be fair, I live in Cornwall and my son was sent two counties away (over three hours drive) when he needed specialist emergency care. Health care in Cornwall is not great for some conditions.

Moth Winn is fundraising for PSPA

@BlueHorses I think I asked this several threads ago, but do we have evidence that he uses the name 'Moth Winn'

Yes, we did consider this carefully, and in depth (of course, we would!)

I have never come across the BBC assuming a partner is called any particular name - the first thing a journalist does is ask you your name:

Mr Winn was diagnosed with Corticobasal Degeneration (CBD) while walking the South West Coastal Path in 2013.
Thames Path walk for couple raising awareness of rare condition - BBC News

Day and night of the 13th. Interesting morning weather forecasts for the 12th/13th

If anyone is keeping a list of claims that long walking is the miracle cure, perhaps they could add this from @Bluehorse's Noon article: "As they came to the end of that journey, they realised nature and the natural world had healed them."

SW might argue that this doesn't purport to be a direct quotation, but she did not distance herself from the statement and (au contraire) allowed herself to be a "Noon Icon" and to appear at a Noon event (until it was cancelled).

Based on Gaussian distribution, isn't Moth's 18 year survival from first symptoms of CBD so far off the typical bell-shaped curve of probability distribution that at this point in time only 3 explanations of his condition and progression are possible bearing in mind that apart from his own condition, there appear to be no known examples of patients reversing their symptoms and sporadically enjoying improved periods of health during an 18 year timeframe:

a) he has discovered a means of not only halting but reversing the progress of the condition (as alleged in TSP, TWS and LL), in complete contrast to all other known sufferers with this condition

b) his condition has been misdiagnosed from onset for whatever reason

c) he has deliberately misrepresented the symptoms of his condition leading to a misdiagnosis

@Peladon In the episode that @SimoArmo is looking at, in detail:

He’d changed, there was no question, he’d changed and according to the doctors that wasn’t possible. CBD is a one-way ticket.
He knew it too.
‘I’m stronger. I feel as if I can put one foot in front of the other and trust where it’ll land.

Yes, the marathon

And the PSPA April 2024 Thames Path Walk

Thanks @brandypath.

I've heard a few people giving the defence that "she was always careful to avoid claiming that walking was a cure".

I suspect that there are very many statements (in books, interviews or elsewhere) which, taken on their own or in combination, would be understood by normal alreaders/listeners as meaning that arduous walking slowed/reversed/healed the disease. If so, a list of them would skewer that defence.

There are umpteen articles where she brazenly asserts that
a) Moth's health was improved by walking and
b) this may be due to various as yet unproved scientific theses that there is some sort of weird chemical reaction released when we walk through the countryside that benefits our health and immune system but nobody, as yet has been able to make the scientific connection between the two.

PS I've always believed in and benefitted from the therapeutic aspect of walking but have no idea whether SW is right or wrong in her assertations about the impact of walking on CBD, but I suspect if there was an iota of scientific evidence that extreme long distance walking benefitted CBD sufferers, that this would have been fully explored in scientific papers.

@Peladon This is quite interesting re: what you are saying from 7:00
Positive Changes and Health Improvements

Bing Videos

Now this is interesting !

She says it pretty directly in the Private Passions programme too. She mentions that there are other unnamed people who have found the same and who have contacted her, so it's def a cause and effect claim IMO.

Picking up the point about the consultant location vs their location, I don't necessarily see that as anything other than continuity of care. DH stayed with his London consultant/hospital for his chronic condition years after we moved up to Wales despite this meaning he travelled a long way once a year to see her. It was firstly to do with familiarity with his case, and secondly moving hospitals/consultants would put him back down at the bottom of the waiting list. A friend of a friend in Manchester keeps travelling down to Cornwall to see 'her' consultant for similar reasons.

Ok that is interesting. Many thanks for the insight.

What is interesting @Catwith69lives is if as you suspect Tim has kept the same consultant, which many of us have confirmed can be quite normal, that consultant would definitely have known that their 2015 diagnosis was being retrofitted to 2013, even if it took them a while to realise, after the book was published perhaps.

If all of this is being dismissed by people thinking, well they raised awareness and money for the charities, £20,000 in 2022, £16,000 in 2023 and £13,049 in 2024 a total of £49,049 is not very much for the credibility they were given, enabling them to, according to the litary contributers guestimates, amass a personal wealth of possibly two million pounds.

I wonder what would happen if the consultant said,

"well on the balance of probability, having seen you for over 10 years, based on your experiences of fluctuations in your symptoms and the fact that you seem to be in reasonable health, despite your cardiological issues which don't seem related to any prior CBD diagnosis, I think we can now say that because your symptoms are so atypical that you don't have CBD or CBS"

Then what?

Then you might say you've had an all-clear scan and -wall'ah- magically cured! Must have been the walking!

It’s interesting — I don’t think she claims, in TSP, that walking cures Moth of CBD. The disclaimer on at least some editions (do we know if it was on it from the very start?) explicitly says all medical stuff is the subjective opinion of the author and shouldn’t be taken over the advice of a professional. We can assume the legal read looked very carefully at any such claims.

But it’s clear that she does claim walking cured Moth of CBD, explicitly, in at least some interviews.

I wonder, if it were possible to log them by date, whether this is something she started doing gradually, as she realised that many readers interpreted the book as saying that unproblematically? That if it were possible to go through her interviews and book events in order, whether we would see her making increasingly explicit claims? Has anyone noticed a trend?

And something I find very odd is that claims in Landlines that scans ‘improved’. That presumably has the same medical disclaimer as the previous two books, but LL is claim objective, checkable, evidenced changes….?

It's quite common for someone to stay under the same hospital specialist if they move away, especially if that specialist has a particular interest in a rare condition.

There are very few examples of things for which a doctor can break patient confidentiality. If they do so, and it's not felt to be justified by the extremely tight rules surrounding this, the worst case scenario is that the doctor can be struck off the GMC register.

A doctor has to take legal advice if, for example, they know a patient is driving illegally; they can't just shop that patient to the DVLA, they have to try to convince the patient to shop themselves - it's a minefield. Ditto informing people when their partner has an STD. Just two examples where you might think that breaking confidentiality would be the obvious thing to do, but where it could cost the doctor their livelihood.

So I think it very unlikely that TWs consultant would be advised to spill the beans. Give the doc a break!!

According to the consultant he has now had CBD for 18 years and yet for all intents and purposes (ie his May appearance in London for the premiere of The Salt Path) appears to be as fit as a fiddle..

This defies any other documented patient with CBD. At this stage, wouldn't you begin to ask yourself questions?

It's also continuity of care that, given it's such a rare condition, would be hard to provide elsewhere. Walton is a specialist neurology centre and TW has, we are told, a very rare neurological condition. There might not be a consultant in the whole of Cornwall who has this specialism. If I were in their (publicly stated) position, I'd say I was willing to keep travelling to appointments to keep the continuity and high quality of care.

Moth at the May 2025 London premiere of The Salt Path

I'm sure the consultant is asking questions. In the letters that we've seen, he expressed doubt and suggests that it might be something "even rarer". But without consent for further tests etc, he may be limited as to what can be done; and TW might actually have something so rare that it's not actually recognised and named.

After all this time (and money earned!) I am pretty sure that the Walkers would resist furiously any attempts to relabel Timmoth's problem.

Good point @Catwith69lives if we were very sceptical we might even think that Tim was quite happy to stay with the consultant who was continuing with this diagnosis, my DD has moved to different consultants with other issues and they generally want to repeat some investigations and tests. I have already explained how my own DD has a one very rare condition that can only be dealt with in London, another rare one that as a child was dealt with in London but now locally.

@mauvishagain I am not attacking consultants, I have so much to be grateful for due to the wonderful care my DD receives. But this consultant does not have to break patient confidentiality, as I said in an earlier post, if a consultant has a duty to report a patient that is exploiting a diagnosis for financial gain and or are causing harm to people, then surely there is a framework in place.