The good news, as you will have seen elsewhere on Hospital Dr, is that the Appeal Court judgement on Simon Singh’s libel case was every bit as favourable as had seemed likely from the distinguished judges’ comments at the end of his appeal. But of course, this isn’t the end of the affair.

It just means that Singh can use the ‘fair comment’ defence when he eventually comes to trial in the controversial libel case brought against him by the British Chiropractic Association. Their lordships gave a right pasting to Mr Justice Eady, who had found against Singh in the initial hearing, which was nice, but as the journalist said, it has so far cost him £200,000 just to “define the meaning of a few words”.

One good outcome of the publicity surrounding the Singh case, and others like it, is that all three main parties claim to be committed to reform of the libel laws. However, we know that saying and doing are not the same thing in politics, so we need to keep the pressure on. If you haven’t already signed the petition for libel law reform, and almost 50,000 of us have, please think about doing it now, and consider asking your colleagues and friends to do the same. The last concerted attempt to boost signatures resulted in a doubling of numbers, and 100,000 names would hopefully ensure that libel law reform at least makes it into the election manifestos.

The BCA have responded to challenges to produce evidence supporting their claims for chiropractic’s efficacy in treating conditions such as infantile colic, and they may yet come to wish that they had done this in the first place, rather than throwing money at m’learned friends. The results have been fairly predictable (you will need to register for this site, but it’s worth the two minutes it takes). Incidentally, and somewhat surprisingly, it turns out that Hitler was a chiropractor.

Anyway, I see that the sun has come out, and after a week of continuous sodding rain in Cornwall, I intend to get out into the garden and make the most of it. The only downside is that this will involve getting the lawnmower out for the first time since I put it away last October, clogged with wet grass and bits of dismembered frog. Yes, I do know that I should take it to bits, drain the petrol tank, lightly grease the nipples and flange retractors and then wrap it in dry sacking before the winter. There are probably even some people around who do that, but you wouldn’t want your daughter marrying one of them, would you?

It won’t start of course. It will be the Christmas tree lights all over again.

We’ve had quite a few retirements at work recently, and several colleagues have slipped away quietly into the darkness, saying that they “didn’t want any fuss”.

Well, blow that! It’s my turn soon and I want it clearly understood that I shall expect a great deal of fuss when I go.

I want to see strong men in tears, and women wailing, gnashing their teeth and (hopefully) rending their garments in good Biblical fashion. I want the biggest display of public grief since Princess Di bought it (but without the flowers - I don’t want all those flowers). A present would be nice, too. I shall place a list with Harvey Nicks.

It’s surprising how much more bearable work is, once you can see an end in sight, largely because you can ignore any ‘initiative’ (don’t you just hate initiatives?) with a timescale longer than six months, and smile serenely as threats are made to cap pensions, abolish merit awards (sorry, CEAs) or introduce uniforms for consultants.

OK, I made the last one up, but I’ve never had a problem with uniforms, largely due to the 16 years I spent in the RAF Medical Branch, and I’ve always thought it would be a good idea for doctors to wear them. At least patients would know who we were, and we could make sure that all those over-promoted ‘nurse consultants’ with stethoscopes ostentatiously draped around their necks could be clearly differentiated from proper consultants by the colour of their uniforms (they’d have muddy brown, we would have nice red ones, with gold piping and those big gold epaulettes like South American dictators, or commissionaires at the Odeon).

Still, it’s too late for me now. I’ll have to serve out my time tieless and ‘bare below the elbow’ (which, if you think about it, means that you should also be bare below the waist, unless you have unduly long arms; not something I’d like to inflict on patients or colleagues, come to that).

Incidentally, in an earlier blog I talked about Henrik Thomsen, the Danish radiologist who was being sued for libel by GE Healthcare. That case has been settled out of court, and I assume it will have been a condition that Henrik says nothing more about it in public. And that, of course, is the problem with the libel law as it currently stands - victims, or should I say defendants, can’t afford to take their case to the judges if their accuser offers an out of court settlement which is anything less than ruinous. I just hope that GE realised that they had slipped up by pressing the case, and accepted nominal damages.

Simon Singh, on the other hand, did have his day in court recently, and it seems to have gone well. However, it is not unknown for judges to sound sympathetic, and then deliver a contrary verdict, so we have to wait, hopefully not too long, for the outcome. 

You know that poem that starts ‘First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist’ and ends with ‘Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out’? Well, I’m feeling a bit like that.

I don’t know if you’ve been following the Simon Singh libel case, but this link to the excellent Sense About Science site will give the background to Simon’s problems with the chiropractors.

And having come for Simon, they came next for Dr Peter Wilmshurst. He was involved in a trial to test whether closing atrial septal defects using a device manufactured by the American company NMT Medical would reduce the incidence of migraine. The results of the trial were negative, and Dr Wilmshurst suggested several ideas to explain the findings, as a result of which he is now being sued by NMT.

Note that an American company are suing him in an English court, for a libel allegedly perpetrated in Washington. That’s because their chances of success in an American court would be significantly less, and because any settlement in an English court will be two orders of magnitude greater than in the States.

And then they came for me. Well, not me exactly, but as someone who edits a radiology journal, it’s getting uncomfortably close to home. They (General Electric Healthcare in this case) actually came for Dr Henrik Thomsen. He now faces financial ruin as a result of remarks made to a small number of radiologists at a meeting in an Oxford hotel, as outlined in this recent Sunday Times story.

In addition to selling MRI contrast media, GE are one of the big three or four manufacturers of imaging equipment, and decisions on which CT, MR or PET/CT scanner to purchase are frequently very finely balanced, being swayed by such apparently minor factors as a recent bad experience with the servicing of existing equipment by a particular company.

However, GE have clearly decided that pursuing a radiologist for an alleged libel only heard by a handful of his contemporaries makes commercial sense, so we must assume that they consider Dr Thomsen’s remarks to be far more damaging than is suggested by media reports and the recollection of radiologists who were present at the meeting.

Still, the Sunday Times editorial was supportive, and it now looks as if the campaign to reform libel law is getting somewhere, with Jack Straw professing to see the need for change.

Something is badly wrong when researchers and editors are afraid to publish and comment on the results of research, just because the libel laws in this country favour the interests of big business over those of individual scientists.

Having read the background to this on the Sense About Science site, I hope as many of you as possible will follow the embedded link to sign the libel law reform petition.