TRANSFORMING HEALTHCARE WITH PRECISION MEDICINE: UNVEILING THE FUTURE OF PERSONALIZED TREATMENT
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Keywords
Clinicians, genomics, genome sequencing, medicine, patients
Abstract
In today's ever-evolving medical landscape, the groundbreaking concept of precision medicine is revolutionizing the way we approach healthcare. By focusing on the unique characteristics of each patient, precision medicine aims to deliver personalized and targeted treatments that can provide superior outcomes. This personalized healthcare breakthrough has the potential to transform the medical field, ushering in a new era of tailored and effective treatments. Traditional medicine has been largely empirical, where physicians rely on patterns and past experience to diagnose and treat patients. Treatment decisions are often made based on the physician's familiarity with similar cases. In this approach, a single treatment or medication may be prescribed for a "typical patient" with a specific disease, even though patient responses can vary widely. This can lead to unpredictable side effects and varying levels of efficacy. It aims to provide the right medicine, in the right dose, at the right time for each individual patient. It takes into account factors such as genetic predisposition, ethnic differences, metabolism rates, and disease stage to tailor treatments accordingly. The rapid advancement of genomics research in recent decades has ushered in a new era in biomedicine, offering the potential to revolutionize healthcare through personalized or precision medicine. This approach seeks to tailor medical interventions to individual patients by utilizing genetic tests, identifying biomarkers, and developing targeted drugs. However, the personalized medicine movement has not been without controversy, igniting a robust debate among its proponents and critics. This essay seeks to explore the assumptions, promises, limits, and possibilities of personalized or precision medicine by reviewing recent literature and situating the debate within this complex landscape.
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