Texas 'medical clinic' tries to intimidate schoolboy, loses

The Guardian reports that a Texas clinic peddling a 'cancer treatment' has still not got the hang of this Internet PR thing. The intimidation tactics they used against a schoolboy, who wrote bad things about them on his blog, included legal threats, threats to contact his school and sending him a picture of his house.

Rhys Morgan, a 17 year-old Welsh schoolboy published a damning blog post on the Burzynski Clinic in August, pointing out that the 'treatment' offered by the clinic had been in clinical trials since the 1990s and, he said, had not been shown to be effective. A 1994 court judgement against Dr Burzynski linked in the post had found that he had defrauded a health insurer by failing to disclose that his treatment had previously been found to be unlawful.

The attempts stopped when Morgan published the full correspondence on his blog. Burzynski now claims that the emails were sent by an outside Web consultant, though they clearly purport to be an official communication from the firm.

How not to handle your own bad PR.