Blog post on Gilderdale documentary winning award

I posted an article at my main blog regarding the award given to the director of the BBC's Panorama programme which covered the trial in 2010 of Kay Gilderdale, who assisted the suicide of her daughter Lynn (who had very severe ME) in 2008. The programme caused a lot of upset in the disability community as it was seen as biased in favour of assisted suicide. I thought it was a bad bit of journalism, as it was sorely lacking in any investigative content about ME and why Lynn and others got so ill.

Not exactly medical journalism

Esther Rantzen on what was really wrong with her daughter

Esther Rantzen, for years, has been the go-to celebrity in the UK when it comes to ME, and has written of her daughter's supposed battle with it in the press (mostly the Daily Mail) on a number of occasions. Two separate "cures" have been reported, one involving Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and the infamous graded exercises which mysteriously prove so harmful to pretty much every other ME sufferer. The second time it involved the Lightning Process, which is some sort of talk therapy based on neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), life coaching and osteopathy (although those who attended said they couldn't see any evidence of any osteopathy). At times, her evangelising has comfortably crossed the boundary of good taste; promoting this kind of therapy as part of coverage of the story of Lynn Gilderdale, who could not talk and probably could not have made it to wherever they were holding their course, is one example.

( Read more... )