Carl Heneghan

And it really did bring home to me the sort of sense of there are huge issues with pollution added in the cars, that there's significant car traffic and the pollution at the same time.

The air quality was utterly miserable and was having a significant impact on people's breathing and respiration out there.

So there's huge issues around pollution and what we're doing in the environment.

It has to be focused in the 2020s.

But actually, that's what preventing overdiagnosis is also contributing to, is to saying what we should be doing is ensuring when we make diagnosis and target healthcare, we're doing it to people who are likely to benefit and we're not wasting resources and using precious resources, wasting energy, carbon emissions on stuff we shouldn't be doing.

No, I'm not going to rant.

I'm going to rail back from that and say...

There were some really interesting bits there that were moments to be in the room.

First was to say there was the inaugural Lisa Schwartz lecture.

For those who don't know, Lisa Schwartz died earlier this year.

And she worked with, lifelong worked with Steve Woolish and her partner, and they've done amazing work in too much medicine, over diagnosis, medical marketing, all sorts of areas.

And Steve gave the first inaugural lecture.

And it was fantastic.

And it was a masterclass in a talk.

He talked about all sorts of areas of their work.

He basically gave a sort of life story of their work, of what they'd done together.

And so that goes through things like the know your chances teaching the public about absolute versus relative risk so you can interpret healthcare information, screening and informing the decision aids, the impact on medical marketing, and also some stuff around the lead time bias is a major issue.

And I think that's one of the things if you understand screening, you really need to understand this concept of lead time bias.

Because much of what we do is just diagnose people earlier.

Therefore, if you have measures like five years survival, they just get better, but you have no impact on overall mortality.