Abstract

It is every parent's worst nightmare to be wrongly accused of abusing their child. Parents therefore need to feel safe when seeing a paediatrician that they are not suddenly going to find themselves fighting to prove that they have not harmed their child. Unfortunately, however, many people also ‘know’ that Professor Sir Roy Meadow is ‘the disgraced paediatrician’ who quoted the infamous 1 in 73 million statistic in the Sally Clark case and that he was responsible for her conviction, and they ‘know’ that he ‘invented’ Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a ‘now discarded theory’. They also ‘know’ that Professor David Southall is the ‘highly controversial’ paediatrician who ‘accused Mr Clark of murdering his children after watching a TV programme’ and who accused a grieving mother of murdering her child. In light of this, it is no wonder that trust in paediatric experts is low,1 when these experts can behave in such a cavalier fashion leading to such disastrous consequences.

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