Bath GP Dr Julian Treadwell rose to prominence at this year’s annual NICE conference with his quietly confident critique of single-condition guidelines and their tendency to lead to over-treatment.
Dr Treadwell has dedicated much of his spare time to tackling the ongoing trend towards both over-diagnosis and over-treatment in modern medicine.
Part of this work has led him to hunt through the evidence within full NICE guidelines and find the real – often surprisingly slim – benefits of NICE-recommended treatments.
And we expect to hear much more from him as he works with NICE to help develop more practical guidelines for GPs on the management of multimorbidity and also when he joins a new RCGP standing group on over-diagnosis, which is due to launch this autumn.
Dr Treadwell says: ‘I’m particularly interested in over-diagnosis, over-treatment and polypharmacy and one of the big drivers of these is the way guidelines have evolved over many years – with good intentions – which encourage maximum uptake of treatments, even those that have very small absolute benefit for an individual patient.’
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