Lucy Letby and the Welsh Fruit Festival: what do they have in common?

I know, my brain works in strange and mysterious ways. I have a hard time keeping up with it myself sometimes, and it quite often leaves me feeling misunderstood. I’m writing this blog post as a follow-on from a WhatsApp chat thread, and a couple of responses I got as a result of that. It seems better just to put it all down in one place.

At the moment I am in the process of setting up what I am calling the Lucy Letby Dialectic Society (LLDS). When it’s up and running the website will be: www.letbydialectics.org

Lucy Letby was a neonatal nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital who was convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven more between June 2015 and June 2016. She was sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order on 21st August 2023.

Nobody ever saw Lucy murder any babies, or indeed do anything directly related to the murder of babies. The evidence against her was entirely circumstantial, and since the reporting restrictions were lifted there have been more and more people questioning the safety of her conviction.

An international panel of medical and scientific experts was then convened and has produced a report stating that the deaths of the babies were all due to substandard medical care rather than murder. This has now been submitted to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) who must decide whether or not to refer Lucy’s case to the Court of Appeal.

I am a paediatrician (a children’s doctor) by trade and during my career I have worked on four level 3 and two level 2 neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Last week I started a new full-time job in neonatal intensive care. The Letby cases are complex, but I can understand them.

Last year I finally finished writing my book, Diseases Have Causes: One Doctor’s Journey with an Apple and a Pen. It’s a book about the philosophy and sociology of scientific knowledge in relation to nutrition. Over the last decade I have become increasingly fascinated by questions like ‘how do we know what we know?’ and why do we believe the things we believe?’ about science in particular. The relationship between knowledge, belief and truth has fascinated philosophers throughout the ages, while the social process of ‘fact-making’ has fascinated sociologists.

These things are not unrelated. We generally understand facts as true statements, but if you begin to understand facts merely as statements around which there is a general social consensus that they are true, then you can begin to identify the interplay of power between knowledge and truth: and that changes everything.

Perhaps the real question with which I am academically obsessed is ‘why do we as human beings believe some of the crazy things that we believe?’ Is it just because we have got the logic wrong, or are there deeper underlying reasons? Sociologists ask ‘what kind of social “work” does this situation do?’

Why do we believe that heating food is good for us? What kind of social ‘work’ might this belief be doing (because it clearly doesn’t make any logical sense)?

Why do so many people believe that Lucy Letby is guilty? What kind of social ‘work’ might her conviction be doing (because there wasn’t any direct evidence to support it)?

Philosophy and sociology might seem like distant, dusty scholarly pursuits, but I am a practical sort of person, and I am only interested in these subjects to the extent that I think they can help us to sort out some of the biggest problems of our time.

I can’t tell you how many people die unnecessarily each year because of the belief that eating cooked food is a good idea, but I suspect it’s a lot. What are we sacrificing them for? The profits of the food and animal agriculture industries? Our sense of ourselves as somehow ‘civilised’ and different from the animals?? Pleasure???

Lucy has been sacrificed at the altar of public trust in the medical and legal systems, and that is not okay. Telling people it’s okay to eat cooked food might not seem quite so horrific on the face of it, but that’s only because we can’t map the effects directly onto any one single person.

I still eat cooked food, and that is not because I think it’s okay. For most of last year I allowed myself to be terrified into silence about Lucy and that was not okay either. When I first found out about Lucy I was so ashamed of my profession that I didn’t want to have any part of it any more, but also, I didn’t know what to do. Now I know what to do and so I’m doing it, because I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t. I simply can’t hold the knowledge I hold and do nothing and still sleep at night.

I felt the same when I first went raw. The physical transformation was so dramatic and so quick that it quite literally changed my life forever, because the question that has haunted me ever since is ‘why didn’t anybody tell me?’ Why does nobody ‘know’ this (it seems to me now) blindingly obvious thing?

For years I didn’t know what to do with these thoughts, but eventually after trying a few different things I decided to found U-Turn Health, and then the Welsh Fruit Festival, and that made me feel better because now I am doing something. It might not be much, but it is something, and it is what I can do. It is the same with the LLDS.

These questions are easy to ask with retrospect. It wasn’t blindingly obvious to me for the first 38 years of my life that heating food was a bad idea, and it only became so to me because I had been vegetarian since the age of eight and vegan since my late 20s, and I had read a lot of books about diet and health and taken a study unit in diet-related chronic disease for my masters degree in public health.

It was blindingly obvious to me that Lucy was innocent very soon after I started to read about her case, but that was only because I have worked in six different neonatal units during the course of my career AND spent six years of my life writing a book about the philosophy and sociology of scientific knowledge.

Explaining these insights is a very different matter. Constructing a clear argument that other people can follow is a job of work that could take more than a lifetime for each of them. I can say ‘eat raw food’ and ‘Lucy Letby is innocent’ and neither of those statements cut much mustard with most people just as they are. The real job of work is explaining WHY… and that is where dialectics comes in…