Lord Moylan (Con)

My Lords, I am not saying—nor was anybody—that a positive attitude on its own is going to save somebody from cancer. Professor Gould also benefited from the fact that he had the best medical treatment, and he went on various experimental courses. That was not my point at all. But people with a positive attitude, as I quoted, tend to live longer. I think that is scientifically demonstrable. I am surprised at the noble Baroness’s intervention. I think we can learn some lessons from this. First, prognoses are not generally individuated. They are medians drawn from large data sets based on clinical trials. As Professor Gould said, if you get a prognosis of six months, the average person will think that means that they are going to be dead in six months, which, from a scientific point of view, is precisely the wrong conclusion. Secondly, even when a prognosis is not based on a median but is an attempt by a doctor to give an individual assessment, it is very likely to be wrong. There are well-established studies on this. I will cite just one, which is Orlovic et al in 2023. It shows that, beyond 14 days, a clinician’s prognosis is almost always wrong. It is extremely unreliable. Within that shorter period of a week or two, a doctor and indeed an experienced nurse can very often say, with great reliability, that somebody is not going to last very much longer. But beyond that, an individual prognosis is of very little value indeed. I think we all accept that for anyone who gets a prognosis, there is a degree of unreliability about it. Nobody believes that a six-month prognosis means exactly six months, or that eight months means exactly eight months, but we have a tendency to think that it is because we do not have enough knowledge—that with a bit more science and research, we could refine that prognosis so that it was more accurate. But as Professor Gould pointed out, the prognosis is merely an abstraction arising from the variability in the data. It is not that we cannot make the prognosis more accurate; it is that—