Does everyone have a rare disease? At a recent meeting of the Rare Disease Research Network it was suggested that if you slice things thinly enough, every person has a rare disease. The idea being that we all have specific genetic and physiological mutations compared to everyone else – though the overwhelming majority of these don’t result in the kind of effects that warrant treatment.

This is certainly an intriguing idea – possibly a fact – and one that is certainly worth thinking about.

‘There but for the grace of God’ is a phrase people may be familiar with – implying that it’s only through chance and circumstance that one individual is not in the same situation as another.

So when we combine the idea that everyone has a rare disease of some sort with the fact that everyone is a patient in some regard, it helps underline how we all benefit from the healthcare advances that come from clinical research.