David Southall faces being struck off medical register by GMC.

[tiredemma]

why this wasnt done years ago is beyond me.

How do you all know he wasn't right?

disgraceful man, he must have an ego the size of a planet, with no morals

Do you know he was, Spockster?

BMJ 2006david southall

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Thank god he's been stopped at last - we hope....

that man brings shame on the profession.

there is a special place in hell for him.

Thanks Fran - the abstracts don't refer directly to Southall though. I expect that Southall being further discredited will make it more difficult for wild and unproven allegations to be made against mothers like you.

Some of the babies Southall experimented on are grown ups now so more cases can come to light.

Thanks Tiredemma - I would find it really alarming if the ethics of Southall's experiments, where he deprived babies of oxygen, had not been questioned when he first published his research.

upwind - worth remembering that the people cited most often in scholarly literature are the people who are most wrong... (because they are dead easy to refute and people do so frequently)

No, but he seems to have gone on from that to assume that all parents are abusers (and that He Knows Best)

Also Sprogger, some of the cases where he interpreted it as abuse were not - there was one where a mother held her hand above the baby's face (which is one way of checking the child is breathing - you feel their breath on your hand) and he claimed she was about to smother the child.
Parental abuse exists but is not as common as he makes out.

He 'failed' to get the consent of hundreds of parents whose premature, vulnerable babies were put into his study into a new ventilator he had designed (which turned out to be a Very Bad Idea indeed and left babies brain damaged at best.). When the parents complained, he somehow managed to find a load of consent forms that he claimed contained the parents' signatures (they disagreed) but which were allegedly obtained by junior members of staff, not him, contrary to proper procedures.

It seems he had other children taken into care in order to use them as guinea pigs, or threatened their parents with care proceedings if they didn't consent.

And he certainly interpreted actions as abuse that had innocent explanations, as Kathy says. He's been found at fault by several investigations, at different levels such as the NHS regional offices.

Thing is, he probably did uncover some actual abuse, but his shoddy, over the top behaviour casts doubt on all his work. You can't believe what he says.

I think he was convinced that he was God, and that he saw abuse everywhere and believed he was standing alone against abusers. Meglomania.

Hmm, I see your point Sprogger. It's quite hard to get one's head round someone not being all good or all bad - he may gave acted appallingly but that doesn't mean he hasn't also done good work.

"Southall was cited in a book I read recently about the behaviours of child abusers. He'd done some research in which he'd put hidden cameras in hospital rooms and filmed familes with their sick children. 39 children were discovered to be being abused while in hospital - he had footage of fathers smothering their babies with pillows, of a mother bending her 8-month-old's elbow back to breaking point (she only stopped when the child's screams alerted a nurse). It's pretty horrible, shocking stuff."

This was Southall's famous covert video surveillance where children were used as bait to see if their parents would attack them. It was completely unethical.

I don't think Southall was ever really interested in child abuse, he was interested in making a name for himself. The experiments where he deprived babies of oxygen (without their parents' knowledge) should be enough for any of us to doubt his motives. Parents who stood up to him were accused of MSBP - there was a story in the Daily Mail quite recently about a family who he had targeted.

Sorry sprogger, the oxygen deprivation experiments make me then wonder about his view of parents and babies in general. Which leads me to be disinclined to trust him wholeheartedly on child protection issues. I'm not by nature suspicious of professionals working in the very sensitive area of medicine and child protection.

Agree with Marina and Elizabeth.

The citation in the book will be based on Southall's own account of his unethical experiment in surveillance. Elizabeth is factually correct that he used children as bait - something that attracted criticism at the time. But the criticism was muted because Southall was so influential. The experiments into surveillance and the new incubator should never have got past an ethics committee.

The editors of the book will have been working on the assumption that he was above-board, as a respected 'expert'. So I wouldn't take it as gospel, frankly. Marina's right, his bizarre behaviour makes all his work suspect.

He's a very strange man; I interviewed him a couple of times years ago before all this came out. He was clearly dedicated and passionate about children's well-being. Tragically he seems to have been blinded to his own faults and resistant to any self-analysis.

he is a dangerous megalomaniac and deserves to go to prison for what he has done.He is a clear and present danger to children and parents everywhere.

David Southall's mistake (if you can call it that) was to appoint himself as an investigator into child abuse with social workers acting as his enforcers against parents. If he thought crimes were being committed against children he should have informed the police, instead he set up his own investigation system, including keeping secret files on parents and children, and involved his colleagues in getting children removed from parents he suspected.

A doctor's job is to cure patients, not uncover wrong-doing. Most doctors understand that fundamental concept, David Southall didn't. That's why he started making crazy allegations of murder against people, using his authority as a doctor to buttress his accusations.

some of these stories about him amke me sick

i agree, donnie.

prison is as close to justice as he'll get on this Earth.

there isn't a place bad enough for him in this world.

good he's a bloody disgrace.Think he was previously disciplined but not struck off.

and for the record I don;t think investigating suspected cases of child abuse which are subsequently proved to be unfounded are a problem I think its his methods* that are a problem. And they are such a big problem that any good work he has done is not sufficient mitigation.

It is the research (and the failure of the GMC to have a proper investigation) that is the big part of this story.

As in "you ain't seen nothing yet". I am working to get the whole story out.