here are significant population health and economic implications if Australia were to adopt recently revised American guidelines. There are few things more controversial in medicine than when authoritative bodies shift the goalposts for common conditions and redefine normal values. This is particularly the case when the normative values for common chronic disease risk factors in the community, such as blood pressure or cholesterol, are made more stringent. In the stroke of a pen, millions of people have a disease or a risk factor they did not have the day before. Is this “the medicalisation of life” referred to by Illich?