@4. Free speech is one thing, spurious and falicious claims are another; we should be careful not to confuse the two.

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/north-east-news/todays-evening-chronicle/tm_objectid=14557214&method=full&siteid=50081&headline=shamed-doctor-probe-name_page.html

[…] Dr Obi is now facing the threat of legal action from a woman who says she paid him £3,500 after she appealed for help with a mystery sickness.

He wrote to Margaret Lewis, 58, after she placed an advert in the British Medical Journal asking for a doctor who could cure an undiagnosed 20-year illness.

Mrs Lewis claims she was visited twice by Obi but she has not been able to contact him since.

Dr Obi, using the title professor, said his company, Advanced Wellness Interventions, could provide “a multi-disciplinary team of almost seven different practitioners”.

He said he would need a lifetime registration fee of £2,500, and an appraisal fee of £1,000 to cover a three-hour telephone consulting session and an intensive home visit and until this was paid in cash into his bank account he could enter into no further correspondence.

Desperate to be cured, Mrs Lewis, widowed and living alone, says she paid her life savings into Dr Obi’s account as requested, and although he did visit her house she said he made no diagnosis, arranged no tests and has not been in touch since.

She said: “I don’t normally part with money like this, but I was so desperate because I have been ill for so long and no one can do anything.

“He did come down and see me but directed a lot of the questions at my partner and we didn’t seem to get anywhere.

“He was very charming. He kissed my hand on the way out.

“But that was the last I’ve heard from him. We’ve called and called all the numbers, even an international mailbox he gave us because he said he travelled in the tropics a lot.

“He promised me a cure, but now I have no money and will continue to get into more debt paying for carers for an illness no one can seem to diagnose. I am devastated.”

The Chronicle tried to find Dr Obi at the address he gave Mrs Lewis but we found the house, in Aycliffe Crescent, Wrekenton, standing empty, having been repossessed by the building society.

Neighbours told us he told them he had gone on a cruise and would be away for a while but they were keen to speak to him because they say he had borrowed furniture from them and not returned it.

[…]

“I was just wondering why someone as important and famous as you doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry?”

Anyone as self obsessed as he is bound to go and try to write his own entry, which will have predictably hilarious results.

These are hard questions because we want to have any opinion heard, but that aspiration in itself might need to account for a situation when one opinion holder tries to use that very freedom to take it from others..

QUACK!!