Dr.Southall struck off Medical Register
This is London.co.uk– Dec 5, 2007
The doctor who destroyed families: Southall struck off for accusing parents of killing their children
Paediatrician David Southall was yesterday struck off the medical register after twice accusing parents of murdering their children.
He claimed one mother drugged and hanged her ten-year-old son with a belt, and he infamously interfered in the case of solicitor Sally Clark, accusing her husband of killing their two sons on the strength of a television documentary.
Yesterday his high-flying career was in ruins after he was barred from medical practice with immediate effect, and castigated for his complete failure to apologise and his "deep-seated attitudinal problems".
"Your misconduct is so serious that it is fundamentally incompatible with your continuing to be a registered medical practitioner," said Dr Jacqueline Mitton, chairman of the General Medical Council's Fitness to Practise Panel.
He blushed slightly and took a long gulp of water as he learned his fate.
Afterwards he remained defiant and unapologetic, saying he was considering an appeal.
"The decisions I took were in the best interests of the children involved," he said.
Southall, 59, has gained international renown for groundbreaking research during his career, which took in the University Hospital of North Staffordshire in Stoke, the Royal Brompton in London and hospitals in Wales, the Home Counties, Doncaster, Rotherham and Barnsley.
He had already been suspended from child protection work in 2004 over his "high-handed intervention" in the Sally Clark case.
He was called before the GMC again over a further series of allegations, which were found proven last month.
Five mothers whom he wrongly accused of deliberately hurting, and in one case killing, their children, gave evidence to the hearing.
Their accounts gave a chilling insight into the consequences of so-called "sleep study" tests that he conducted on 4,500 of his young patients during the eighties and nineties.
Police forces in the Midlands, Wales and London are investigating if children were inadvertently harmed or may have died during his experiments, where patients were allegedly deprived of oxygen and given small amounts of carbon dioxide, ostensibly to find the cause of cot death.
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