Roy MacKinnon had been successfully treating patients in Wales, UK, using the Dr. Hulda Clark protocol until he was investigated under the 1939 Cancer Act and the 1968 Trades Description Act. He was taken to Court over a two year period accused of breaching the 1968 Trade Descriptions Act, and charged with claiming he could cure cancer, HIV and MS.

When did you first decide to become a natural health practitioner?

Around 20 years ago I decided on a career change and I got myself a qualification in counseling but later noticed that sometimes people who were depressed were not getting better as rapidly as I hoped. This caused me to look further at things like allergies, flower essence remedies, etc. to see whether the whole process could be accelerated and I began looking in a rather more detailed way at herbs and supplements to see if they would help people. These had been of interest to me since I was a teenager.

When I became ill with ME/CFS, I had found all of this information really quite helpful. I had received Chinese medicine, acupuncture and then shiatsu. In the early 1990s I went to the Bristol School of Shiatsu and did my 3 years there as a student. Then I practised the shiatsu method that had helped me.

It was only after this that I discovered the work of Dr. Hulda Clark which I then added to the work I was already doing.

I believe you used the Hulda Clark methods to help people with cancer? Can you describe her protocol?

Basically the approach of Dr. Clark is to understand the individual as somebody who once had a very well functioning immune system but became ill because a build up of pathogens and toxins had been too great for their immune system to handle. It follows therefore that if you remove those pathogens and toxins, you are taking the burden off the back of the immune system and allowing it to recover so the individual can get well again.

Yes, exactly. The reason people get ill if they’ve been previously well, is either that they need to be detoxified – perhaps they’ve had too many antibiotics, pharmaceutical medicines, they’ve got parasites or their nutritional intake is lacking or inadequate.

I think the important point here is that Dr. Clark encourages individuals to look for the root cause of illness. She’s not interested in treating individual symptoms, although symptoms are obviously part of an overall picture. Orthodox medicine treats symptoms so it’s not surprising that they don’t really have any cures. Our interest is trying to get to the root cause of whatever really triggers and allows subsequent chronic illness to develop. You cannot really sort that out unless you can get to what has caused that malaise. I am not denying that maybe an inherited or psychological factor is involved. There is something that has bothered the immune system to cause it to collapse and if it can be identified and removed, the individual starts to become well again.

The other thing of course is diet. If you are not giving the body the right nutrition, it cannot repair itself, it cannot recover and you have to re-educate people regarding their eating habits.

The whole thing with the food angle is very, very important - not only food but also water. The bottom line in our society is money not health. As a result people are tempted by what looks and tastes better rather than what does them good. You have all sorts of chemicals and pesticides that facilitate the market driven economy and it’s often at the expense of health. What looks best and is cheapest is not going to maintain your health because it can be toxin-laden and sometimes pathogen-laden as well. That applies to water as much as it does to food. The quality of our water is deteriorating almost on a daily basis. Since we all have to drink, it becomes quite central to our health. You can go into a supermarket or health food shop and buy organic food, what you can’t do is buy organic water. There can be up to 500 different toxins in drinking water.

Did you have success with your methods of healing?

Oh yes. This was one of the very helpful factors when the case came to trial. I was able to draw on a number of cases that were very positively helped by using the Hulda Clark toxin/pathogen removal process. There were very happy people whose health had improved who were delighted to come to court to support me. There were a dozen people who wanted to come, some of them coming great distances – from Northern Ireland, Norfolk, Cornwall and the north of England. Some of them had to travel over two days to get to Swansea.

What I am really interested to know about is how it all started - when you first encountered the difficulties with the authorities over treating people.

The troubles really started when I came to Swansea in 1999. In the last few years since coming, I have been attacked by the BBC no less than 3 times.

What happened exactly?

What happens is that your work comes to their attention and they try to find a disgruntled patient or somebody like that. It seems they contact or are contacted by this rather sinister organisation, formerly the Campaign Against Health Fraud (CAHF) - now called HealthWatch, which appears to be effectively just a branch of the pharmaceutical multinationals. This is a quackbuster organization and there is another one in the US called QuackWatch. They are out to discredit alternative health practitioners.

This is exactly what happened to a friend of mine who was a homeopathic practitioner working in South Africa. They found a disgruntled patient and used her as a means of trying to shut down his clinic.

They appear to have their own connections within the media. Exactly what they do I can only surmise but it looks to me as though programme producers or directors are encouraged to try and promote an angle in a particular programme.

So was it a programme or just a news item?

The programme that ruined my reputation was ‘Week In, Week Out’, a Welsh programme which features anything that is happening in Wales. A feature about my practice was also shown on a national programme, CrimeSquad. I have had two attacks from BBC Wales and one from BBC nationally. I think CrimeSquad was the first one which could have been seen by 8 or 9 million people.

The problem is the reporting of the BBC. There is no objectivity in reporting. The person they are busy investigating is not being investigated at all, because the conclusion has already been arrived at before they ask you any questions whatsoever. It doesn’t much matter what sort of answers you give, as they will be edited out. It is the worst form of journalism and the BBC seems to be full of reporters who will stoop that low. To them what they’ve got to do is produce something which is a bit sensational so they come as judge and jury having found you guilty. They simply want to persecute you in order to produce a programme which they’ve only got limited time to do. In terms of the end product, it was determined even before they left their office.

Did they come and speak to you? Did they interview you?

Well firstly they tried to surreptitiously do this under cover. On one occasion they posed as a patient with a friend and one of the reporters had a buttonhole camera. Another had a tape recorder inside her handbag. On another occasion there was a telephone conversation which was simply tape-recorded without me being informed. So there is a lack of honesty, uprightness, forthrightness in this. They tried to sneak information from me which would benefit their programme-making and the truth goes out the window.

So you have somebody who posed as a patient who wasn’t really a patient? How many times did that happen?

Three times.

Three times people came to you as patients? Could you sense that they were a bit bogus, that they didn’t seem to have anything much wrong with them?

On one occasion they came to my house. On the two other occasions it was done by telephone.

So do you treat people at your house?

Not these days. I stopped after the first occasion when the BBC sent the reporters under disguise and I worked simply by telephone but then they just sit and record your telephone messages. Then of course they can edit them and do whatever they like. I did not get a fair investigation.

And how long did that go on?

It all happened within a 2 to 3 week period when they were producing a programme. But typical of paparazzi, they will follow you all over the place in order to try and get an interview. I can remember on one occasion they waited for hours and hours around the corner from my house and then chased me across Swansea. I had to go into a friend’s house in order to get away from them.

How awful.

What gives the BBC the right to be judge and jury, to convict a person without trial?

By the very fact that they have put you on a programme called CrimeSquad or Week In, Week Out, they have convicted you, tried you and found you guilty of a crime. And yet not one piece of evidence had been heard on the side of the defendant.

And trash your reputation at a stroke.

The thing is you cannot actually take them to court unless you have huge amounts of money. Some of my patients are saying ‘Why don’t you sue the BBC?’ But the BBC would take you for every penny all the way to the House of Lords and even then you might not win.

People have to be very brave to take on the big boys because their lawyers will use every way to win.

But the BBC sets itself up as though it were part of the legal system of this country.

The BBC seems to work closely with the government.

Like a police state, you are guilty if they decide you are guilty, whether or not evidence is heard on your behalf or not. This is the country we live in. In Europe, it seems you are guilty unless you can prove your innocence. In this country – you are innocent unless you’re proven guilty. You are free to do what you want unless there is legislation which stops you.

There is a serious lack of investigative journalism nowadays.

No objectivity. Really good quality objective journalism ought to be open to whatever is uncovered. This is not the case with these BBC journalists. They have decided what the outcome will be even before they decide to make the programme. How can that purport to be objective? The truth has not been presented at all. Even if it were, it would be edited out.

And you say you were on television three times?

That’s right. They actually inferred on one occasion that they expect most people to crack up after one such event and to stop their line of business as a result of the way in which they treat their victims. They were somewhat surprised that I was still on the go after two of these incidents, let alone three.

On the third occasion, what they did was to take their files and present them to the local Trading Standards office. Regardless of how trading standards operate, you have to understand that this was political. When the BBC is making such a request, trading standards have to investigate. So Trading Standards haul you in for an interview.

So you had to go?

Yes, and it’s costing you money because you have to then get hold of a solicitor because you cannot get Legal Aid until you are formally charged. You are hauled in for a really quite dreadful interview. It’s almost Gestapo-like. After that they make a formal charge. If you are not well off, you are entitled to Legal Aid, so at least you get legal bills paid but the idea is to ruin you wherever possible. It’s not the Trading Standards people who were to blame, it is the BBC, because they were putting pressure on the Trading Standards. The Trading Standards know that if they are not seen to investigate, then obviously the BBC can give that local Trading Standards office a very bad name.

But who was behind the BBC investigations – the so called Health Watch, do you think?

Yes, it appears so. In my opinion they are backed by the pharmaceutical multinationals.

And you were charged with saying you could treat cancer?

Cure cancer. Under the 1939 Cancer Act, you are not allowed to advertise that you can cure cancer. They said I was making a claim to cure cancer – something which I could not and would not do. So they said I was making a false claim in terms of the services I was offering the public. Well as I’ve explained, I don’t offer to cure cancer. I offer to use the protocol of Dr. Hulda Clark in order to unburden the immune system of its toxins and pathogens and thereby help the body to recover. I don’t go out to say I’m going to cure you of this particular chronic illness, let alone cancer, multiple sclerosis or whatever. But attempts were made to trick me into saying that. Therefore your freedom of speech is denied as well. But nevertheless they charged me with claiming to cure cancer, HIV, and MS under the 1968 Trades Descriptions Act.

So do you think that they picked on you because there have been attempts to try and close down Dr. Clark’s work in Mexico and they found out you were using her methods?

I think so and also there aren’t too many therapists in this country that will take on chronically sick people as patients and assist them if they wish to pursue the Dr. Clark approach. You can number them on one hand. So therefore by hitting out at me, they are striking a great blow against alternative medicine because very clearly, no pharmaceutical company that has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a supposed cancer cure wants the public to get to hear of a natural approach, which would therefore undermine their investment. That of course also includes lost revenue for all the side effect pills for the side effects, etc! That would threaten the profitability of pharmaceutical companies which is required by their shareholders. As I was saying earlier, the bottom line is always money.

The problem is that the number of people getting cancer these days is on the increase. Therefore, a practitioner might be quite innocently treating a cancer patient with nutritional supplements for example and then could be unfairly charged with saying they can cure cancer.

Absolutely, if the patient has made the therapist aware of the presence of a chronic illness, then there is an obligation on the part of the therapist to describe their therapy as something other than ‘curing’ the ‘chronic illness’, even though effectively that might be exactly what the therapist is doing. The therapist has to be very careful how he phrases the aims of his therapy and why. Remember, we no longer live in an enlightened democracy and human rights such as freedom of speech can no longer be taken for granted in countries governed by politicians and governmental bodies strongly influenced by the power of corrupt orthodox medicine.

And tell me about the charges in the Court cases and how they proceeded.

Well the charges against me were originally four. Two were in connection with cancer, one was in connection with HIV, and one was in connection with multiple sclerosis. Three of them were supposedly coming from a telephone call, a telephone message by a BBC reporter posing as a patient. The fourth charge came from somebody who had started using the Clark method and actually I think I spoke to her twice or three times in all. She had some sort of heart problem and decided to discontinue because she was finding the lights of the electronic zapper, which is part of Dr. Clark’s approach to clear parasites, were not agreeing with her heart. Whether or not the zapper was the cause of the complaint is another matter.

Subsequent to seeing the Week In, Week Out programme when it was televised, she decided that I had to be a charlatan so she wrote in to the BBC and the BBC passed her letter and correspondence on to the local trading standards and they formed a fourth charge around that.

But was she the trigger do you think?

No, the trigger I think came from a previous patient who had died, who had come to me probably with only a matter of weeks to live and asked me what to do. I told her what Dr. Clark would do. This included dental work and she came to Swansea for this work with a local first class dentist. But her husband was totally against the whole approach and when this poor soul died, he then became very, very bitter and I think it was he who in the first instance triggered the Quackbuster connection that resulted in the BBC creating the Week In, Week Out programme.

Yes, this is the trouble. You get certain patients that expect too much. It is especially difficult if they are seriously ill.

The reality is that this particular patient I think would have died anyway. She really was suffering very badly from a brain tumour and when she actually approached me, I believed she had only about 8 weeks left to live. Remember, she had already been through the orthodox protocols and they’d given up on her. Yes, she died. The dentist and I - we do what we can for such people who come and ask us for our help but her husband was very bitter. He is obviously understandably grief-stricken but what he did was to display misplaced anger because it wasn’t either the dentist or I who had robbed him of his wife. The whole set up from the word go and the poverty of orthodox treatment was what had failed his wife. The dentist and I became the butt of misdirected anger. And that’s how these cases are instigated in the first instance.

Yes.... And tell me how the court case went exactly because you must have had a reasonably sympathetic judge for the charges to be dropped.

I went backwards and forwards to court for two and a half years. I don’t know how many times I appeared. About fifteen times.

Really?!

It starts off in the magistrate’s court and if you think you will get a better hearing, you can elect to be tried by jury and that takes it to the Crown Court. But there are all these little bits and bobs where the process of law has to be pursued with an absolutely monotonous routine and your case will come up for mention for something to be done, for it to be committed or other stages in the proceedings to be advanced and so on and so forth.

As regards the Prosecuting counsel for the Crown, I’ve never seen a more dilatory mob in all my life. If ever I had an insight into the legal system, this was it. Everybody else goes out and works for a living. They were lazy, they were slow. We would get a situation where the prosecuting barrister would actually stand before the judge and say, ‘Well, no your Honour, I have not done this’ or ‘No, your Honour, I have not done that’. The Judge would get more and more annoyed and would defer the proceedings for another two weeks in order for the prosecuting barrister to do what was required. But he’d come back the next time and say no, he had not done it again.

Oh no! Just dragging it out deliberately do you think?

No, I just think laziness.

Gosh and they’re being paid so much for that.

Whenever a solicitor or a barrister goes to court, as far as I’m aware, they get a fee for their appearance. So therefore it’s in their interests ….

To go as often as possible. So you had to go back so many times?

Absolutely, and it was not just to Swansea. I had to go to Carmarthen on a couple of occasions because they have circuit judges and they don’t necessarily always convene court in one locality. You can understand too that if you were not on Legal Aid, each time the case had a hearing attached to it, you would be involved in further expenditure.

Taking time off and probably a whole day to get there and back.

I actually asked my solicitor at the end of the trial that if I had not qualified for Legal Aid, exactly what sort of a total bill would I be facing and he said in the order of £30,000 or something! Now that is absolutely horrendous.

But eventually what happened was that the three immediate BBC telephone recorded charges were dropped because the prosecution was so dilatory that they ran out of time. They had been unaware that there was a one year proscription on some of these charges being brought to committal. My solicitor, who was conversant with this, was aware the time limit was coming up. He therefore encouraged the barrister who now represented me, to put it to the circuit judge that these three charges should be dropped and they were.

The prosecution then wanted to have the charges reinstated and you have to have a high court judge that operates in a Crown Court to reinstate them. The judge behaved very well. This happened prior to the Christmas recess last year and he went away and mulled it over his Christmas dinner and came back in January saying he felt that my barrister’s claim that the charges should remain dropped was absolutely in order and that these charges should not be reinstated. So that left me with just the one charge.

Which was what?

That was where this lady had been involved who had decided, having seen the BBC programme, Week In, Week Out, that I was a charlatan, that I had presented myself as somebody who purported to operate the Clark system. The way it’s recorded in the charge was that it was a falsehood.

The actual charge read: FOR THAT, you Roy Duncan MacKinnon did in the course of trade or business on the 7th. January, 2003 recklessly make a statement as to the provision of a service which was false, namely that you could cure cancer by means of a particular therapy when that was not the case. SUCH THEREFORE, being contrary to Section 24(b) (ii) of the Trade Descriptions Act 1968.

That this implies is that only orthodox medicine can be used to ‘cure’ a chronic illness – according to medical experts who wouldn’t recognize parsley if it was put in their soup and yet shout they are experts in alternative medicine which they have never studied.

She was a patient - the lady with the heart problem?

As I said, probably on two or maybe, three occasions, I had spoken to her on the phone and she was the lady with the heart problem. She did not complain at the time, please note. She registered the complaint with the BBC only after watching the televised programme ‘Week In, Week Out’. I doubt if she would have done it had she not seen that totally bigoted programme.

So many people believe what they see on TV - that it must be right because it’s on television.

All I can say to anybody who watches a BBC programme which is reporting a set of circumstances, where a reporter has been given a briefing and there is some sort of commentary - don’t take it at face value. They know what they want to report before they start and anything that might be to the contrary of this, can be dropped and edited out.

But that was the basis on which this lady had proceeded to make a charge. Something it is unlikely she would have done, had the BBC not made this programme and broadcast it in Wales where she lived.

Tell me more about how the final court case went.

When I appeared at the trial, the Judge was quite upset because when the Prosecuting Counsel stood up to open the proceedings, he advised the Judge that his three witnesses could not be produced together on that day and he wanted to bring the other two into court on the next two consecutive days.

And the Judge didn’t want it to be drawn out like that...three days in a row.

Well of course - court time costs a lot of money. I had my barrister and my solicitor and his team who managed to get no less than 12 witnesses, all capable of appearing within a 2 day period. They, on the other hand, couldn’t get 3 witnesses to appear in a single day. Never mind 2 days, it had to take 3 days.

So the Judge immediately said, ‘Well we’re going to start now. If you’ve got no witnesses then I’m afraid you’re going to have to present no witnesses. And the prosecution case will then rest.’

Anyway a recess was called at that point. Remember the jury was not yet sworn in. But in that recess the Prosecuting Barrister then came back and asked for the charge to be amended slightly. Instead of saying ‘cure cancer’ which was the supposed lie, it was changed ‘to treat cancer’.

And the Judge would have none of it. He could see that this was just time-wasting on the part of the Prosecuting Barrister. There was then another recess, prior to which the Judge had said: ‘You should understand that I cannot see where the complainant has actually levelled a direct charge against Mr. MacKinnon and in view of this, when it gets to half time, you know what the outcome will be’. And he took his glasses off and he looked the Prosecuting Barrister in the eye. Well it was perfectly obvious that what he was meaning was that the case would collapse, you see.

So this further recess was then granted and when the Prosecuting Barrister then came back in and the Judge entered the Court, the Prosecuting Barrister said that he would not be moving forward with the case and even before he sat down the judge turned to me and said: ‘Mr. MacKinnon, you are a free man. I will record a verdict of ‘not guilty’.

Oh fantastic…!

It all happened so quickly in a matter of about 5 seconds. It was quite amazing!

So that was at the end of July 2005 I believe? After two years of going back and forth to Court! So now, do you feel that you can carry on with your work?

I’ve lost a very large proportion of my business. I’ve not been able to advertise – not knowing exactly what I am allowed to advertise. The damage to my health has been quite considerable through the stress of the whole thing and I’m going to have to take some time to get back to where I was. Exactly how best to move forward is very, very difficult in this climate, when this country of ours is rapidly becoming like a totalitarian state.

I am busy seeing at the moment if I can find barristers or lawyers who are really prepared to tackle and take on the so called expert witnesses which prosecuting counsels bring in against alternative practitioners. For example, for my case they brought in an oncologist whose statement said: ‘Oh yes, I’ve heard of Dr. Clark. Oh no, it’s all rubbish. What? Parasites related to cancer – nonsense. Bacteria related to cancer – nonsense’.

Very often such medical expert statements are a tissue of lies but you need to have a barrister who is prepared to tackle this because if you say, ‘Well can you provide me with the evidence for this?’ they usually can’t. I have now got quite a lot of first class evidence and information which shows that parasites, bacteria, viruses and so on are directly related to cancer. The expert witness is assuming and depending on the fact that nobody will actually query his statements. But if you have got somebody that can do precisely that, then you are in a much stronger position.

I am very fortunate that I had really good loyal patients to help me but other people may not have that. They may not have been in business long enough. What do they do? What you really need to do is tackle the expert witness and the only way you can do that is by having a specialist barrister. This is part of what I’m busy looking into at the moment.

Yes, there must be some but many in the legal system are so keen to make a lot of money. It wouldn’t hurt them to do a good deed every now and then for a reduced price to help people.

Absolutely. It does occasionally happen that a solicitor will do something pro bono. Not often! We do need a good approach here and the way to handle any court case like that is to be able to tackle the supposed authority and expose the weakness of the case. The legal system at the moment does not cater for this. My solicitor and my barrister did not know how to tackle the expert witness. My information really came from Leo Regehr, Dr Clark’s brother, with help from Tim Bolen, American Consumer Advocate, who has experience of handling the Quackbusters.

Yes, Tim is great. We need more like him over here in Britain.

In the absence of somebody like that we can at least learn what it is that he does so well and how it is that he does it. That’s what Leo was busy getting me to understand and to learn during the whole of this last 2 years and I picked up a lot. I’ve got a fair idea of how you attack the credibility of the so called expert witness and of just how much your court case depends on the credibility of an expert witness.

It brings to mind that expert witness, Sir Roy Meadow, who stated that there was a 73 million to one chance of having two cot deaths in the same family. He must have got that statistic out of thin air. We are all taught to revere authority and experts to a ridiculous degree.

The point is that an average oncologist knows nothing about alternative medicine. Secondly they can be demonstrated to have an ingrained bias against alternative medicine. Thirdly, they are often quite prepared to lie through their teeth for their very fat fee of being an expert witness. They get maybe £750 or £1000 or similar amount for just making a two page statement.

Therapists are going to need to read this as there are going to be others in my position and they might not be so lucky. I’ve heard of other people who have been given jail sentences, given heavy fines. I consider myself very fortunate.

Therapists are going to need to know how to direct their own legal team and remember lawyers are very arrogant. They don’t like to be directed. They say we will take your instructions. No they won’t. They will give you instructions.

If you are paying them, they should be taking your instructions.

Of course, as you’re looking at £75 or £100 an hour for a lawyer and for a barrister it can be £250 – anything up to £500 an hour. Maybe we can attract some young lawyer, out to make his name or improve his career prospects. You can see the possibility of the kudos that might accumulate in his direction if he was to be the first to really take on the so called expert witnesses, almost as a way of life. So they cannot stand there and literally bullshit their way through court statement after court statement. That’s what they do.

Coming into law soon will be the EU Nutrition & Health Claims Regulation which states that you are not allowed to make any health claim about any product unless there are scientific studies supporting it which have been approved by the EFSA - which is ridiculous.

I think the important thing is that the people of this country be really well informed. They need to understand where all of this legislation is coming from. Who it is that underpins this, who it is that is backing all of this? They will find that it is people with vested interests. You must remember that the chemical and pharmaceutical industries are the biggest businesses in the world. They have more pounds and dollars than any other business sector and what they are trying to effectively do is totally control the market at the expense of any other competitor.

When we consider how medicine is supposed to be. For example, doctors have to take the Hippocratic Oath. It is Hippocrates who said, ‘Let your medicines be your foods and your foods be your medicines’. Here the whole spirit of the work of Hippocrates sworn on by doctors, has been totally thrown overboard. It therefore is an absolute nonsense to talk in terms of doctors taking the Hippocratic Oath. It is more likely a Hippocritic Oath – they are being hypocrites in effect.

Why would they not want to side with the therapists? Well, very clearly there are various reasons for that, not the least of which is the way they can get all sorts of side remunerations such as paid holidays, dinners, etc., paid for by pharmaceutical companies. Once again, as I said before, the bottom line is money.

If there is any reader out there who knows of good solicitors or barristers capable of tackling the bigotry of so-called expert witnesses, please, it is very important that you contact me. roymackinn@aol.com