Why Are They Trying to Discredit Dr. Barry Durant-Peatfield?
by Mary J. Shomon
April 2001 -- In the United States, there's the American Medical Association. And in the United Kingdom, there's the "GMC," the General Medical Council, the organization which licenses medical doctors to practice in the UK. While the GMC claims at its website that their mission is "Protecting patients, guiding doctors," it's not clear how the GMC will be protecting patients in its latest effort to condemn and take away the medical license of one of the nation's most popular doctors, Dr. Barry Durrant-Peatfield.
Dr. Durrant-Peatfield treats hundreds of patients, focusing on thyroid, adrenal and chronic fatigue problems, and has been the doctor of last resort for thousands of patients throughout the UK and Europe, who had given up hope of ever recovering from chronic illness.
Dr. Durrant-Peatfield is no stranger to controversy. Ten years ago, he successfully defended himself against a GMC case filed against him, which wrongfully accused him of professional misconduct. After forcing the doctor to provide caseloads of evidence in his own defense, and then dragging the case on for an entire year, the GMC eventually just dropped the case, citing no reason.
Since that time, the doctor has continued to build a thriving private practice working with patients who have thyroid disease, adrenal deficiency and other metabolic disorders. Dr. Durrant-Peatfield works with the natural prescription thyroid drug Armour thyroid, and his treatments are sometimes considered unconventional by the National Health Service's highly restrictive approach to thyroid treatment.
It's thought that the doctor's use of natural products -- along with his approach of treating thyroid patients according to symptoms and not just laboratory values -- has triggered the ire of the conventional and bureaucratic GMC.
Earlier this spring, Durrant-Peatfield received a long missive from the GMC, accusing him of serious professional misconduct in his natural thyroid and adrenal support protocols. The GMC provided a list of hundreds of charges that according to Dr. Durrant-Peatfield are "completely unfounded." The doctor mounted a lengthy and impassioned response, only to receive yet another huge missive with a list of items to address. This time, Dr. Durrant-Peatfield had only seven days notice to respond to the Interim Orders Committee, which was planning to meet to discuss the suspension of his registration, citing the doctor as "threat to the public." At that point, Dr. Durrant-Peatfield's vast network of supportive patients started mobilizing and submitting hundreds of letters in his defense, and contacting the media, including the BBC.
The day the committee was to meet, Thursday April 19, 2001, Dr. Durrant-Peatfield was not informed of any outcome. In a call Friday, he was told that the case hadn't been considered, and in fact, it would be considered the following Monday. As more letters poured in, the GMC again called Dr. Durrant-Peatfield, and told him that would defer the case until May 11, 2001. They also indicated that the doctor is free to continue practicing up until that date.
As they state in their web site, "the GMC is best known to the public through handling complaints or other information which casts doubt on a doctor's fitness to practise." The actual patients the GMC purports to protect, however, are suggesting that the public interest is the last concern of the GMC, and instead, the group is on a witch-hunt to weed out unconventional doctors.
Many patients are asking if Dr. Durrant-Peatfield is such a "threat to the public" as the GMC claimed, why would they defer their committee meeting several weeks and allow such a "threat" to continue?
Such proceedings sound like a process that is far too familiar, even in the United States. The villification of alternative practitioners, and in some cases, efforts to remove alternative or unconventional doctors from medical practice, are going on throughout the United States. With more Americans visiting alternative practitioners than conventional ones in 2000, there's clearly an economic interest behind efforts to discredit alternative practitioners and disenfranchise patients.
The GMC's Interim Orders Committee seems to share a similar purpose, and determined to ensure that eventually, UK patients suffering from thyroid, adrenal and chronic fatigue problems are left with no choice but the National Health Service, its limited treatment options, and overreliance on TSH tests,and levothyroxine as the sole means of diagnosis and treatment.
What is likely to happen? Will the committee meet again? Will the Preliminary Proceedings Committee actually determine if there's a case? Or will the case be deferred again and again, and then dropped, as the GMC did ten years ago -- serving as an ominous "warning" to Dr. Durrant-Peatfield that the GMC is watching and ready to strike at any time again in the future?
We don't know the outcome. What we do know is that if Dr. Durrant-Peatfield is no longer allowed to practice medicine in the UK, thousands of patients will be left without the treatment that is helping them maintain good health, and the GMC is likely to be emboldened to villify other doctors who do not adhere to their rigid and often ineffective approach to thyroid and adrenal conditions.
