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The Best Medications For Your Genes
blackbearnh writes "Until recently, physicians prescribed drugs to patients with dosages based only on weight, and with no idea if the drug would be effective for that particular person. But as this article on Forbes.com highlights, the same advances in genomics that are letting people know about their likelihood of getting certain diseases can also let doctors know what drugs, and what dosages, will be likely to do the most good. 'Tamoxifen, the much-heralded cancer-fighting drug, has been shown to have little benefit for 7% to 10% of patients taking it. In the past, we would have just said that it works 90% of the time. But now, with our new genomic knowledge under our belt, we can say that it works nearly 100% of the time for people with the 'right' version of the CYP2D6 gene, and 0% of the time for people with the 'wrong' version, who make up roughly 7% to 10% of the population.'"
getting denied health insurance for having bad genes
Bidil prescriptions should have been based on genetic markers. On the other hand, it's hard to do a credible whole-genome analysis for this sort of thing without a good theory in the first place.
Religion is any collection of assertions that are prohibited from being questioned or verified. We simply assume them to be true.
In the case of medicine, one type of religion is the assertion that both men and women exhibit no differences in responding to treatment by the same drugs. About 15 years ago, the medical community admitted that this assertion is false. Congress began deliberately funding the development of drugs that specifically help women.
The grip of religion on medicine has still not been broken. Nowadays, the politically correct religion is the assertion that all ethnic groups and all racial groups are genetically identical. Therefore, researchers should not study ethnic or racial differences in the efficacy of various drugs.
When will we admit that there are genetic differences? For example, most East Asians suffer from lactose intolerance. Europeans do not.
The current attempt to use a person's genes to determine the efficacy of anti-cancer drugs is a first step in breaking this politically correct religion.
That's why many countries have public health care. It's just simply fairer and better.
Say NO to unpaid Internships!
If drugs become targeted to certain DNA profiles, wouldn't it be likely that medical centers ask you to let them keep records of your DNA? Well, may be not your complete DNA, but certain genes. I wonder what could happen if such records go to the "wrong" hands, as health insurance companies.
I hate signatures
The problem is, you are, like soooo many before you, confusing significant cultural influence with some sort of inborn genetic trait: >so far none have done very well in the 100m sprinting event So you are saying that there is some "karate gene" then? What gene makes Americans poor at soccer while great at Basketball? The point is, certain cultures value certain sports more than others, and thus those sports attract the pool of athletes from a certain country. >And great influence in other fields such as finance. You realize that Jews were basically *forced* to be bankers for a large part of history right? Tax and interest collection as seen as Taboo for Christians, so they made the jews do it. Same thing with science: if you can get run out of town at a moments notice, you tend to value learning and intelligence, as those are things that pack easily.
... Oh yes; Gattaca.
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