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Personalized medicine is great if you want to charge people a lot of money for marginal results, or if you are in the sciences and your goal is full understandi
by reasonattlm 9y ago
Personalized medicine is great if you want to charge people a lot of money for marginal results, or if you are in the sciences and your goal is full understanding of everything in human biochemistry.
But all the real, meaningful goals in medicine are basically the same for everyone, barring the very, very tiny number of people with serious genetic abnormalities. And even in their small genetically abnormal groups, the reason for their issues are the same for everyone with the same specific mutation.
99.99% of the population ages and suffers age-related disease for exactly same underlying reasons. The molecular damage is exactly the same. Ditto the pathogens that cause infectious disease. You tailor medicine to the pathogens, to the molecular damage, to the mutated gene in an inherited condition, not to the person. Rejecting personalized medicine is the most cost-effective way to proceed towards mass-manufactured, low-cost, effective medicine.
Fix the inherited diseases with gene therapy. Repair the molecular damage that causes aging. Build the technologies that effectively destroy pathogens. Don't focus on the tiny variations in individual responses to these things before you try to actually address the root of the problem. This is my complaint about personalized medicine in a nutshell: it is displacement activity, distracting from paths that will be far, far more effective in improving health and addressing medical conditions.
- pas 9y agocost-benefit. Determining which kind of medicine works well for you when you have a serious problem is quick and cheap compared to "solving aging", even if the latter will "solve" the former.
- melling 9y agoHow much does it cost and what are marginal results? Most people view their health as priceless. If people are willing to pay for it and the price decreases by 100 fold in a decade, will we all see some benefit? Will this lead to a better understanding of human biology?
- jjtheblunt 9y agoSensible, but why do you assert the variations in metabolic pathways are tiny between, say, an arbitrarily chosen african and a north western european?
- AlexCoventry 9y ago> But all the real, meaningful goals in medicine are basically the same for everyone I think your view is a bit narrow. For instance if you get cancer, the goal is "cure MY cancer." And like unhappy families, many cancers are broken in unique ways. You might find the abstracts here interesting: http://www.immuno-oncologysummit.com/Personalized-Cancer-Vaccines/ http://www.immuno-oncologysummit.com/Personalized-Cancer-Vac...