Would the advances of yesteryear happen today?

There is little of humour to be found in the furore surrounding the GMC panel report into the conduct of Dr Andrew Wakefield, which described him as dishonest and irresponsible.

The only exception was when one of his supporters branded the inquiry into the conduct of his MMR research “a kangaroo court”. Now it seems to me that a process which has taken 197 days, found more than 30 charges proven and which has cost several million pounds might be termed many things, but kangaroo ain’t one of them! This is a bit like saying, “the lack of bureaucracy in the NHS is a disgrace”. But reason does not seem to characterise Dr Wakefield’s supporters or indeed the doctor himself.

He did not attend the hearing in person preferring to air his views, surrounded by his suporters, at a noisy press conference outside the front door. What stood out was his defiance towards both the GMC and the medical profession at large, and his utter refusal to accept that he could be wrong in any way despite the considered views of his peers and many independent researchers.

The whole inquiry was clearly a conspiracy by the establishment and the drug companies to silence him. Wakefield contra mundum!

However, this brings to mind a conversation I had back in the seventies with a venerable cardiothoracic surgeon over an open chest. I was spending a very unhappy 12 months as a surgical registrar at a London Center of Arrogance (as it was in those days) and was assisting with a closed mitral valvotomy, a technique pioneered in Britain by Baron Brock of Wimbledon in the late 1940s. “Of course he killed the first ninteen,” confided the venerable surgeon who had trained under Brock, “but the twentieth survived!”

Now I have no way of confirming the veracity of this and I do not wish to malign the great man’s reputation. However if true and, if the standards which apply today were applicable then, Brock would undoubtedly have been suspended long before he reached case number 20.

There would have been a full inquiry and questions in The House. He would likely have been arraigned before the GMC and even worse in the gutter press. I can see him now, flash-bulbs popping, waving his fists while he defiantly challenged the profession to prove him wrong (he was by all accounts a Lancelot Spratt type of surgeon, not one of your shy retiring sorts).

But the difference between him and Wakefield is that he was proved right, and his work led to the transformation of the lives of many of his patients and the advancement of the speciality. But would he have been allowed to achieve this today?

Tags: MMR