Profiles In Irresponsiblity

Let’s NOT talk about horses in Enumclaw!

When my readers speak, I listen. I did a quick reader survey this week and two out of three readers agree that I should never in any column whatsoever discuss non-veterinary procedures involving horses on Enumclaw farms, as to do so may offend. The third reader was a sick bastard. Therefore I’m going to talk about something sure not to offend, namely infant death, imprisonment, and professional misconduct.

What I want to talk about is Sir Roy Meadows and his troubles. This is a story with a moral, having to do with the idea that everyone is entitled to his or her opinions and everyone has a right to be wrong sometimes. Well, sometimes, maybe, but not always! As Sir Roy has recently learned.

Roy Meadows is a British pediatrician whose testimony in British courts has sent several mothers to jail for murdering their infants, based on the idea, known as Meadow’s Law, that “one sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder until proved otherwise.” That was in turn justified by his calculation that the odds of SIDS occurring twice in an affluent family were around 73 million to one.

Here’s a law of my own, I call it Browning’s Supposition: any statistic that’s more accurate than the raw data it could be or is supposed to be based upon is bogus on its face. My law tells me for example, that in Star Trek’s “Errand of Mercy,” when Spock says that his and Kirk’s odds of surviving are approximately 7824.7 to one, and I know the Vulcan smart-ass can’t even see around the next corner, I can safely conclude Spock is up to his pointed ears in BS.

Meadow’s calculation is even worse than that. He started with the odds of one case of SIDS occuring in a family and simply squared it to get the odds that it happens twice in the same family. In doing so he tacitly assumed that each non-homicidal instance of sudden infant death was independent of every other such instance.

In fact though, there may be genetic factors, or environmental factors, or innocent childcare practices that could result in SIDS. Meadow’s disregarded all those possibilities.

You’ve probably seen the signs that say, “Back to Sleep.” It’s been shown that putting babies to bed on their backs dramatically reduces incidents of SIDS. That one discovery alone proves that SIDS isn’t wholly random and that there are causes that can run in a family.

Which wouldn’t matter if Meadows’ opinion were just the opinion of a crank doctor who also believed, say, that cows could fly provided only that the air they stepped on could be made hard enough. We would call that quaint, and we’d knight him, and we’d expect him to live like one of those old codgers in every episode of The Avengers, walking around in their mansions in the country sipping tea out of a hose attached to a robot filled periodically by a loving maid, who turns out to be the real villain, so we can see her and Mrs. Peel fight it out at the end.

Meadows ‘expert’ testimony in courtrooms, and his popularized Law, and his bogus calculation of odds were all used to convince juries to convict at least hundreds, perhaps thousands, of parents for the murder of their own children over the last decade. But a lawsuit in Britain that began in 2003, charging him with professional misconduct, has finally concluded that his testimony was false, that he abused his position as a doctor, and he has been banned from practicing medicine in Britain.

Hmm. Reckless expert opinions by crank experts only seeking power and influence, leading to tragic consequences – who might I be really talking about, I wonder? And can I work in an ancient TV reference? We’ll have to find out some other time.