Doctor at centre of Prime Time report is struck off

A Belfast doctor who prescribed a controversial supplement that includes the main ingredient of bleach has been voluntarily struck off the UK's General Medical Council (GMC).

Finbar Magee was the subject of an RTÉ Prime Time programme in which he said MMS would be a "good treatment" for a child from Dublin with autism.

Mr Magee applied to be removed from the GMC register in advance of a fitness to practise hearing due to be held at the GMC’s Medical Practitioners Tribunal in November.

A spokesman for the GMC told The Irish Times on Friday: "I can confirm what we have about Dr Magee on the List of Registered Medical Practitioners: as of September 21st Dr Magee is no longer registered or licensed to practice, having relinquished his licence."

Mr Magee had been a doctor since 1987. The GMC had been investigating him following the Prime Time report which revealed that in 2011, he directed MMS be given to a three-year-old child with autism.

Medical register

In correspondence last year, Dr Magee defended MMS and other controversial treatments.

In October, the GMC suspended his licence on an interim basis while it continued its investigations. However, Mr Magee recently applied for erasure from the medical register and the GMC case examiners accepted a voluntary strike off.

As a result, with immediate effect, Mr Magee no longer has a licence to practise medicine and is no longer permitted to work as a doctor in the UK or in Northern Ireland, in private or public practice.

Doctors removed from the register can no longer hold themselves out to be a doctor. Any attempt to do so would be a criminal offence.

The industrial bleach solution MMS was described as a cure-all for disease, but also as a claimed "miracle cure" for autism. Its main promoters are part of a church, Genesis II, led by a former gold prospector, Jim Humble.

The main ingredient in MMS is sodium chlorite, an industrial bleach and disinfectant, which is oxidising, corrosive and harmful to the human body.