ABSTRACT
So how would you define ‘disease’? In fact, this is fraught with problems because disease definitions change with time and across cultures. Do you, in fact, need to suffer from a disease as part of the definition? Does a person have the disease before the symptoms appear? This is particularly important now that there is screening for many diseases and people may have abnormal ‘disease markers’ without any symptoms, or the ‘disease marker’ occurs in people who will never have the disease. This can lead to over-treating people who have lesions considered as premalignant but who would never develop invasive cancer, or people who have raised blood pressure but might not have a stroke or heart attack.
