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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
How about placebos? I suspect they might work much better on some people than others.
Very true. I have friends that think they're worthless. But I only have to take 4 of them (1 in each corner of the room, at 9:04am, without exhaling) and my OCD stays completely under control. They make a world of difference.
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.
I'm not going to argue about the mysterious information you have, since you don't go into details on it, but as the author of the article, I should tell you that it's part of the "O'Reilly Insights" series, not a straightline Forbes piece, and I very much was writing it from the perspective of "here's a significant piece of medical advancement that will affect us as individuals, and is also going to make drastic changes in the pharma industry.
You say that there aren't enough drugs that genetic variance makes a difference in, and it's all a big scam to get people's data. Personally, I think that major differences in the effectiveness of the leading breast cancer drug, and huge variance in the uptake of the most commonly prescribed blood thinner, are pretty significant, and I'm damn glad I know that I overmetabolize Coumadin, because I could very well be in an ER with a stroke some day.
We're just in the very earliest stages of looking at how genetic variation affects medicine, and once we start to build a larger database of fully sequenced individuals, I'm sure we'll find more and more cases of genome-influenced variability.
And for the record, I'm an applicant to the Personal Genome Project, which is about as public a distribution of genomic information as you can get, so I am certainly putting my money where my mouth is as far as choosing the benefits of greater knowledge over the fear of discrimination.