Carl Heneghan

The other thing that was interesting was probably two things.

There was a talk by Michael Shirley, who was a patient representative who gave one of the most vivid narratives of his journey through prostate cancer.

And as he said at the end, he said, you know,

I thought I'd die with this.

And actually, that's not the case.

And his whole story and what he told was a really interesting journey about our impact on giving people diagnoses and misinformation and sometimes doctors doing things without thinking through the issues.

So that's really interesting.

That makes me think just to say in 2020, preventing over-diagnosis will be in Oxford in September.

And there are a couple of things that will be on the agenda.

I like the idea of the patient representative and getting the stories together.

But one of the things that struck home to me was this concept of

You know, the proportion of people being diagnosed with conditions is going up and up and up from these expanding disease definitions.

Tessa Cox talked about polycystic ovary syndrome there and using the Rotterdam criteria that's been adopted by the guidelines, literally doubled the number of women with polycystic ovaries overnight.

Hypertension guidelines increase the number of Australians by 2 million who would have a diagnosis of hypertension overnight if they were adopted.

So one of the things that is a move is to bring primary care definitions in terms of redefining the diagnosis definition so that they're more applicable and more, if you like, reflective of the actual problems on the ground and don't lead to this massive swathe of people with diagnosis.

And I think...

That really is an incredibly important issue because when you look at some of the way the guidelines are going, as soon as you hit 40, you have a diagnosis and then you're right for treatment.

And is that the right way we want to go?

So I think this area is such an interesting area, important area.

But I do like what you've said and I think we should go out and get a call for individuals to give us their stories on what overdiagnosis or their journey has been