Gillian McKeith is truly ghastly, but we are gullible enough to deserve her
Rod Liddle says that the TV nutritionist, no longer a 'Doctor', personifies our misplaced trust in health experts and our spectacular ignorance of science generally Acouple of years ago an overconfident Scottish woman called Dr Gillian McKeith made history by being the first person ever to examine human stools on primetime television. A nutritionist — whatever that is — by trade, her shtick was to induce indolent and feckless working-class people to defecate into a tube and then — holding the tube aloft for the benefit of the viewing audience — berate them for the spineless quality of their product. From this unique vantage point she would then castigate the workingclass people about their diets and force them to eat mung beans, lentils and chard, with 'hilarious' results.
Someone somewhere obviously thought this would provide compelling television. Someone somewhere still does — McKeith is still on our screens, poking around in welfare-funded lumpenprole poo and bossing people about. Never mind Big Brother or Celebrity Love Island — Ms McKeith has provided us with the real low point of television in the 21st century, not just for her repulsive intrusion into the private lives of fat, cretinous, poor people, but also for the sheer vacuity of her approach and the breathtaking gullibility of the general public. People actually took her seriously. And did as she said.
From now on, though, they might be less inclined to do so. McKeith has lost the very thing which, in the eyes of the public, allowed her to behave in a manner which in ordinary mortals would result in a one-way ticket to the booby hatch. She has lost the 'Dr' bit of her name because, as it transpires, she isn't one. To be sure, she has a distance-learning PhD in 'holistic nutrition' from the American Holistic College of Nutrition — but apparently this august institution had not been accredited by any recognised educational authority. Maybe it's like that American college which made Ian Paisley a doctor. In any case, she's not a doctor in the way in which most of the public — and her ill-advised subjects — would recognise the term. And so, shazzam! she is stripped of her authority. Analyse that in a tube, love.
Bung a couple of letters — Dr — before someone's name and if they tell you your liver is made of Gruyere cheese and that dogs give you diabetes, you'll believe them.
And this is the more important point to emerge from McKeith's welcome defrocking: the staggering level of ignorance among the general public about science, coupled with a concomitantly breathtaking gullibility when faced with 'scientists'. McKeith's perorations about nutrition will be no more stupid than they were a week ago, when she was ennobled by the term 'doctor', but people will be less likely to believe her now. It is quite probable that most of the audience (and her subjects) thought she was a moonlighting general practitioner, a member of the scientific clergy afforded something close to reverence by the population at large — despite the fact that they are, by definition and necessity, merely well-informed generalists with an in-depth scientific knowledge of absolutely nothing. I do not mean to demean GPs, but most of us should visit the surgery only when we need a prescription for a symptom we have diagnosed at home via medical literature. You surely would not go to your local doctor to find out what was wrong with you, would you?
Society's exaggerated regard for doctors is perhaps one of the reasons Harold Shipman was able to dispatch scores of elderly people before the police caught up with him; no other profession is so insulated from public contempt or, indeed, independent scrutiny.
None of this is the fault of GPs, of course; it is our fault. And the presence of McKeith on our television screens is our fault too. We're all to blame. We shrink before science and scientists; we remove ourselves from the scene and let them take over (and are frequently exhorted to do so by scientists who are jealously guarding their patch). And what they tell us, we believe as an irreducible fact — which is to misunderstand science itself, of course.
The evidence of our ignorance about matters scientific is all around us every day. It is there, of course, in the Daily Mail's obsession, its bizarre Manichean duality between stuff that gives you cancer (mice, all food, breathing, infidelity, asylum-seekers) and stuff that can cure it (some fish, being quiet, Jesus Christ). It is there in almost every presentation of social or medical statistics on television and in the conflicting evidence we read, day in day out, about what foods are healthy for us (things 'without' chemicals) and what are not (things 'with' chemicals). If you ever find yourself in a quiz team, choose a branch of science as your specialist subject; the questions will be exponentially easier than if you had chosen English literature or history. Our hopelessness with science, our manifest lack of knowledge, is a given; it is assumed.
And our lack of knowledge is present in the highest quarters, too; it is not just the plebs who don't get it. It is an institutionalised ignorance. Take the case of Professor Roy Meadow, a paediatrician. Back in the late 1970s Roy 'discovered' an illness called Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy, a mental affliction which resulted in mothers killing their own children. That in itself is a fairly distressing business, but there were plenty of other things about Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy which seemed a little odd. For a start, it was an illness with no telltale symptoms until it was too late. In other words, it was impossible to spot a sufferer until a child was dead. The presence of a dead child, then, was the only recognisable symptom of the illness. Nor was there a cure. Further, in diagnosing the illness, once a child had been killed, a refusal on the part of the sufferer to accept that she was thus afflicted constituted prima facie evidence that she was afflicted: denial, you see. Despite these oddities — impossibility of diagnosis, impossibility of cure — the medical establishment lapped it up and — more worryingly — so did our law courts. Many women were convicted of smothering their babies under this new condition of Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy, which seemed much more interesting than the old boring one of cot death or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Paediatricians took to the witness stand and their words were accepted as objective, unchallengeable fact — rather than informed opinion based upon a new and fashionable paradigm. And then, years later, many of the women appealed and Meadow's illness was exposed to proper logical scrutiny. The position now is that in many parts of the world (Australia, some US states) it is a condition which is believed not to exist at all — it has been struck from the record. And over here Roy Meadow has been struck off too, effectively — and disgraced. And yet once this creation of his was a scientific fact in which we all believed and upon which wholly innocent women were given life sentences in prison and families torn apart. And now: all gone.
This is not simply the case of a rogue scientist subverting the scientific method, although there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Meadow either deliberately or inadvertently misinterpreted statistics; it is rather more about our collective gullibility when faced with what we are told is scientific evidence. Our critical faculties desert us — largely, I suspect, because we think we do not have the intellectual wherewithal to challenge the scientist standing before us, handing down the tablets of stone. What we miss is that science is a matter of opinion arrived at in much the same way as most other opinions are arrived at: through the observation of certain events. Scientists may well be more rigorous in their testing of hypotheses than I have been, for example, in my fervently held opinion that Peter Mandelson is an agent of the Antichrist. But the same principles apply in either case.
Roy Meadow is, I suppose, an extreme example of lay people forgetting that science is about probability, about the balance of things. The whole business of the former doctor Gillian McKeith, though, is pretty extreme in its way. It would not surprise me if, after all, there really were an illness which provoked mothers to kill their babies and that Meadow got it at least partly right. Similarly, there is a germ of truth, I suspect, in McKeith's contention that an unvarying diet of pepperoni pizza, litre bottles of Pepsi and family-sized packs of Cheesy Wotsits will turn you into a fat, flatulent oaf with bad skin and a shorter-thanusual life expectancy. But it is time we stopped being bullied by the likes of McKeith. Time to suggest that there may be another, opposing point of view.
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