Health council appeals against Noakes finding
LOW-carb guru Tim Noakes is back at the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA)‚ in trouble again for a tweet he posted four years ago advising a mom to wean her baby onto a low-carb, high-fat diet.
He won his hearing at the HPCSA after giving 12 days of evidence on why his diet for the baby was not contradictory to evidence on what babies should eat and was found not guilty of misconduct or unethical conduct.
Dietician Claire Julsing-Strydom‚ then head of the Association for Dietetics in SA‚ had complained about Noakes after he told the mom to wean her baby onto real foods.
The mother had asked on Twitter if the diet was okay for breastfeeding babies. She was worried about the wind associated with broccoli and cauliflower – vegetables popular in Noakes’s diet.
Noakes’s tweet read: “Baby doesn’t eat the dairy and cauliflower. Just very healthy, highfat breast milk. Key is to ween [sic] baby onto LCHF.”
The council‚ which regulates doctors and health professionals, is appealing against the 2016 finding made by its own professional conduct committee in a threeday hearing.
Noakes has questioned the cost of an appeal by the council which has spent money on two advocates and a lawyer‚ and is then paying a lawyer‚ doctor and advocate for the appeal committee.
“It could run into millions based on my legal costs,” he said.
His lawyer‚ Adam Pike‚ asked “where were the bodies” [deaths] caused by the tweet. Pike was suggesting that far too much had been made of a tweet which caused no real harm.
Noakes will argue that the information he gave on Twitter was entirely accurate.
He said there was no doctor-patient relationship with the person who tweeted and his advice to wean onto an LCHF diet was entirely compatible with South African dietary guidelines.
It suggests meat‚ eggs and vegetables which‚ he says‚ is what the World Health Organisation suggests.
Advocate Ajay Bhoopchand SC argued for the HPCSA that the tweet was not just to the mother but could be read by everyone and be taken as advice by all people on Twitter.
He argues that Noakes was a sports doctor who did not have knowledge to give dietary advice to the mother.
He asked the sports doctor on the judging panel‚ Dr Bobby Ramasia‚ if he as a fellow sports doctor had spent a single day in neonatal and paediatric practice and whether he had expertise to give advice to babies.
He then said Noakes was guilty of unprofessional conduct.
Noakes’s advocate‚ Mike van der Nest SC‚ will defend Noakes’s tweet, which he will argue is not viewed as medical treatment. – TimesLIVE