Sunday 28 October 2007

Is this doctor responsible for parents being falsely branded as child abusers?

Full Story:
http://www.stopinjusticenow.com/News_0494.htm
Lawrence Alexander suffered a difficult childhood. Neighbours pointed at him in the street. He was inexplicably bullied at school. When he invited his few friends home for tea, they nearly always refused. His family moved from Cornwall to Sussex and then to Shropshire. In every fresh place, there were whispers. His parents lost their jobs and the only member of his extended family who sent birthday presents was his father's sister, Aunt Nina. At 13, Lawrence began to ask why his upbringing seemed different to everyone else's. It is only today, nearly eight years on, that he knows the full truth: his parents had been wrongly accused of one of the worst crimes imaginable — deliberately harming him as a baby. As a result of the allegation made by children's doctor David Southall, the family became social pariahs. A bundle of papers in Lawrence's NHS records followed him to every new GP and new school, repeating the claim that his parents had hurt him. The accusation has scarred his life and theirs. Lawrence has never before told his deeply shocking story. The 21-year-old is central to a Government inquiry into Dr Southall, which could establish once and for all his links to one of the worst scandals in British medicine for years. The doctor has been praised as a pioneer by colleagues, while vilified as arrogant and dangerous by patients. He has also been in trouble over remarks he made concerning the case of Sally Clark, the mother who was given two life sentences for the murder of her two children before being released after medical evidence emerged to prove she was innocent. Dr Southall, who had never met Sally, accused her husband of the murders, a totally unfounded allegation which led to the paediatrician being declared guilty of professional misconduct and barred from child protection work for three years. The present inquiry, overseen by Attorney General Baroness Scotland, wants to find the answer to a crucial question: were Lawrence's parents — and many others — falsely smeared as child abusers so that Dr Southall could put their children into care and use them as guinea pigs in deeply contentious medical experiments, which many would argue were also deeply immoral? In the 1980s and 1990s, under the aegis of Dr Southall, thousands of sick children were given breathing tests — called 'sleep studies'. The experiments, authorised by hospital ethics committees, were carried out despite the doubts of worried parents. Incredibly, it is now alleged that some of the tiny babies were forced to breathe poisonous gases and deprived of oxygen. The results of these tests were stored by the paediatrician in 4,500 secret files.

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