Happy Birthday MSBP

August 21, 2008 permalink

This month is the thirtyfirst anniversary of the publication of an article in the Lancet by Roy Meadow initiating Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. Using this theory thousands of blameless parents have been deprived of their children. Perhaps the low point of Dr Meadow's career was the conviction of Sally Clark for homicide in the crib deaths of two of her babies. She was later exonerated by the courts but died without recovering from her conviction. Barbara Bryan suggests that the Lancet should apologize for starting this mayhem.

We scanned a copy of Meadow's article Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy: The hinterland of child abuse.

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Release Date: August 13, 2008

: Lancet owes Munchausen by Proxy dis-membered families an abject apology

Still ignoring pleas for provable facts validating Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSP) in its publication of “Hinterlands of Child Abuse” by UK’s attention-seeking knighted doctor Roy Meadow, Lancet lets the 31st anniversary (Aug. 13) of his life-altering article slither into another year.

First, slowly read and then read each word again at http://web.tiscali.it/humanrights/articles/meadow77.html. Repeated readings show how overloading an article with apparent detail numbs the brightest and best into believing Roy Meadow’s home-wrecking writing must be true.

Take a deep breath and begin compiling answers to the most basic of a journal’s queries: who, what, when, where, how and why? Other than Roy Meadow himself and two real or imagined families there is no factual or traceable information.

How many journals have been party to as much myth and mayhem as has been tight-lipped and unrepentant Lancet? The once renowned medical journal gave unearned legs to the theory (not a disease, disorder or diagnosis) of MSP.

Clearly, no one at Lancet asked pre-publication questions. Rarely has anyone able to expose the myth of MSP done so since, although no one has challenged assertions of MSP’s scientific baselessness either.

Who Really Named MSP?

Oh, and check whonamedit.com to learn who actually did coin the MSP name a year before Meadow used it and, to this day, accepts the perverse plaudits.

From which other source with Lancet’s stature would the world accept such a noxious notion: that mothers tell tall tales about non-existent, exaggerated or induced illness in their children to bask in the favor of those magnificent doctors?

What other editors have let slide an author’s brazen admission that he saltloaded a sick infant whose chloride levels, when the alleged baby was ill and serially admitted for emergency care, were far too high?

Are there editorial boards which, more than three decades later, resolutely refuse to address, correct, apologize for an imaginative article that has done as much monumental damage as “Hinterlands” around the globe?

Was it not a clue that Roy Meadow’s admits his notes were shredded?

Is there no interest in the UK press and elsewhere that during Roy Meadow’s hours of need under professional scrutiny not a single one of the doctors, hospitals, nurses, lab techs or even surviving family members mentioned in “Hinterlands” appeared in person to verify what Lancet printed 31 years ago?

An apology from Lancet will not reconstitute families whose vanished children had genuine illnesses and many of whose mothers have died early deaths because of notations of MSP in their own medical records.

Time to Denounce the Notion

Lancet’s finally doing the right thing decades later—like the occasional apology for slavery, mistreatment of natives, scandal of sterilizations and such—will not fix an incredible wrong.

It will, however, appropriately expose the attention-seeking, self-styled so-called expert purveyors of the imaginative MSP label that they, prosecutors, the press and the public have exploited and enjoyed.

If MSP was never more than an excuse to silence those pesky (read that: lying and homicidal) mothers of ill children, if Roy’s unfair revenge against the fair sex was to make Lancet complicit in helping him project his own malignant attention-seeking on them, then no professional or wannabe since Lancet’s “Hinterlands” publication has claim to any moral ground.

Designating someone as an “expert” on MSP, as cruel courts worldwide persist in doing, only fuels the fires of fiction that Lancet set into motion 31 years ago.

Where is the judge with wisdom and brass balls (or the female equivalent) to stop the onslaught of innocents and parents or caretakers taken out because of a scientifically non-existent excuse (as in “fabricated” to “induce” a false allegation or “confession”)?

Legally whisking newborns from delivery rooms to pre-adoptive homes, as happens so often to benefit the takers and receivers, is the booty, bounty and shame of what Lancet wrought 31 years ago and must denounce.

Barbara Bryan
Communications Director
National Child Abuse Defense & Resource Center

Source: web posting by Barbara Bryan