Carl Heneghan

You'll also get six cases of lung cancer will be over-diagnosis.

That's the people who will have a lung cancer detected, and it will never go on to cause any problems.

So one of the things here is what I'm really interested in is the decision to screen or not will be a value judgment, whether you think it's a good or bad thing to do.

Our job is to educate and inform the policymakers and the public.

And these journal papers certainly don't do that as they currently stand.

And I think we need a real change in terms of these papers to say, here's the absolute numbers.

And now you can make a value judgment on whether you think this is an important thing to do based on all of the data and all of the important issues that you want to know about.

I think what's important is that people doing the research have to understand the emotiveness around the decision to screen or not.

And in understanding that, they should be adhering to this concept of producing the absolute effects.

But what's clear is that is not happening.

You have to go in the back of the paper.

You have to do quite a bit of maths to get to that sort of natural frequencies.

And it did take me quite a considerable time.

And I consider myself quite numerous.

I'm sure there's many statisticians out there who disagree.

But actually, it is difficult.

And what's interesting is so few people do this.

So you're left with this confusing picture of, oh, well, there's a reduction in lung cancer mortality.

What's the problem?

We should screen everybody.