Thread by @gorskon

Here's a thread about a @BBC news report about Hallwang Clinic. Hallwang Clinic, as regular readers might recall, is an alternative medicine clinic in Germany that specializes in combining unproven experimental treatments with quackery like homeopathy, all at a high price. 1/

Hallwang is notorious for this sort of thing, charging desperate patients huge sums of money for a combination of conventional therapy, unproven experimental drugs, and alternative medicine. I first wrote about this 3 years ago. 2/ respectfulinsolence.com/2016/11/08/the…

Perhaps the best expose of Hallwang was published by Lindsay Gelman. It's a heartbreaking read. 3/ longreads.com/2018/03/22/the…

So, in March, @BBC published a report about Hallwang, specifically about Gemma Nuttall, a young woman with ovarian cancer who sought treatment there. Her family raised thousands of pounds online, with the support of actress Kate Winslet, to send her there, and I wrote about it.4/

Nuttal was only 28 years old and had just had a baby. It’s entirely understandable that the diagnosis of a terminal cancer was devastating to her and her family. No new mother wants to face a situation in which she won’t be able to care for her baby and see her grow up. 5/

Gemma's mother found Hallwang, which offers alternative therapies such as ozone treatment and vitamin infusions alongside drugs not available on the NHS. Hallwang does not publish survival rates but its website includes testimonials from former patients treated there. 6/

The cost, however, was high. The bill for the first trip was €108,000, with future visits needed for “top up” treatments. Gemma’s crowdfunding campaign raised £16,000, impressive indeed, but nowhere near enough for her treatments. 7/

Then an email arrived from a representative of Kate Winslet. The actress wanted to help. And help she did, boosting the crowdfunding campaign. 8/

In February 2018, Gemma reported herself cancer-free, and appeared on the @BBC alongside Kate Winslet to thank her for saving her life. 9/

Unfortunately Nuttall’s cancer recurred in May in her spine. She became so ill that traveling to Germany again was no longer an option. She died last October, and, according to the @BBC article, the video of Nuttall on TV praising Winslet remained on the Hallwang site. 10/

So why am I Tweeting about this? Well, after I wrote about the @BBC article, I got a nastygram from Hallwang. 11/

My response, as always to lethal thuggery, was to ask specifically Hallwang thought to be erroneous/libelous. In this case I also couldn't help but note that the @BBC hadn't changed the article as far as I could tell. 12/

I didn't hear anything after that for nearly four months. Then, out of the blue, Hallwang emailed me again on the Fourth of July. 13/

I couldn't believe it. Had @BBC actually caved to legal threats from what I considered a quack clinic? Was it true? Unfortunately it appears to be true. Here's the link to the original article. It now returns a 404 error. 14/ bbc.com/news/health-47…

And here's the Wayback Machine version of the same link. As you can see, the reporting appears to have been quite solid. 15/ web.archive.org/web/2019030612…

Because @BBC cravenly caved, I had little choice but to take my post down too, at least temporarily. Basically, the BBC had left me and any others who had commented on its story out to dry, and having broken links on the blog is bad anyway. 16/

So why did @BBC cave? When I talked to the reporter in March she said BBC was going to defend. Now, she tells me she can't tell me anything this time other than that the BBC did indeed pull the story. 17/

I get it. Clinics like Hallwang are litigious, but factually the article was solid. Why did @BBC, sometime between March and last week surrender? I don’t know, but there's a story there. I'm not the only one who was threatened by Hallwang for comnenting on the BBC story. 18/18

To LEGAL threats. I admit that autocorrect error dish make me laugh.🤦‍♂️