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I'm really conflicted. I don't think this approach will necessarily mesh with how we traditionally treat medicine. There are many cases where we consider someth

I'm really conflicted. I don't think this approach will necessarily mesh with how we traditionally treat medicine. There are many cases where we consider something a disease, and then we find people who live with it with no issues for decades. What if, even though those people technically have diabetes, they're still fine? I guess you have to define what "fine" even is. How much disease can someone have before they're sick? How good is someone supposed to feel? Thinking about this more... I don't think this was a well written article. They could have gone much more into the larger issues. It would be nice of general practitioners had better tools though. It should be trivial for them to see which drug will work best based on someone's genes, for example. And the way we measure blood pressure these days is stupid. People's blood pressure goes up just because they're in the doctor's office. Giving people a glucose monitor, heart rate tracker, and blood pressure monitor to wear for a week should probably be standard.

thereisnospork 7y ago
From an outside perspective: Imo as a society we should reframe the question from 'how to we cure people?' to 'how do we make people's quality/quantity of life better?' It feels somewhat as if there is a gradual creep of what qualifies as a 'disease' and is therefore worthy of treatment. It also seems like there is an archaic adverseness to non diagnostic related measurement and data. The argument e.g. if we detect something that might be a tumor in a full body scan we have to instigate a series of painful and probably unnecessary biopsies. Imo (again) this represents an overly simplistic view of what the appropriate treatment should be. To say nothing of the dearth of information we have about the day-to-day and hour-to-hour variation in biomarkers in both the healthy and the sick and all the good that information might be used for.
nradov 7y ago
Personalized medicine is barely getting started. We only have data on a few drugs to determine safety, efficacy, and optimal dosage based on genotype. Much more research is needed. Practitioner tools aren't the major obstacle here.
Gravityloss 7y ago
A lot of the time people have some unexplained trouble. They are tired, have pains or repeating infections or what you can imagine. They can be "fine" mostly and never find explanations during their life. They might not even try. It is tedious and just costs so much for an uncertain outcome. But for some, maybe their life quality really could improve relatively easily, if only the problem was correctly identified.
DanBC 7y ago
> Giving people a [...] blood pressure monitor to wear for a week should probably be standard. Wait, isn't that already standard? My English NHS GP gave me a blood pressure monitor for a week. The practice nurse taught me how to use it correctly, and told me why I was taking at least three readings a day. I paid a small deposit for the machine - £10, waivable if I couldn't afford it. I'm surprised this isn't the case everywhere.

thereisnospork 7y ago

From an outside perspective: Imo as a society we should reframe the question from 'how to we cure people?' to 'how do we make people's quality/quantity of life better?' It feels somewhat as if there is a gradual creep of what qualifies as a 'disease' and is therefore worthy of treatment. It also seems like there is an archaic adverseness to non diagnostic related measurement and data. The argument e.g. if we detect something that might be a tumor in a full body scan we have to instigate a series of painful and probably unnecessary biopsies. Imo (again) this represents an overly simplistic view of what the appropriate treatment should be. To say nothing of the dearth of information we have about the day-to-day and hour-to-hour variation in biomarkers in both the healthy and the sick and all the good that information might be used for.

nradov 7y ago

Personalized medicine is barely getting started. We only have data on a few drugs to determine safety, efficacy, and optimal dosage based on genotype. Much more research is needed. Practitioner tools aren't the major obstacle here.

Gravityloss 7y ago

A lot of the time people have some unexplained trouble. They are tired, have pains or repeating infections or what you can imagine. They can be "fine" mostly and never find explanations during their life. They might not even try. It is tedious and just costs so much for an uncertain outcome. But for some, maybe their life quality really could improve relatively easily, if only the problem was correctly identified.

DanBC 7y ago

> Giving people a [...] blood pressure monitor to wear for a week should probably be standard. Wait, isn't that already standard? My English NHS GP gave me a blood pressure monitor for a week. The practice nurse taught me how to use it correctly, and told me why I was taking at least three readings a day. I paid a small deposit for the machine - £10, waivable if I couldn't afford it. I'm surprised this isn't the case everywhere.