The Problem With Personalized Medicine

gManZboy writes "Talk of individually tailored medical treatment isn't pie in the sky. This approach eventually will help us address risk factors even before a disease can invade our cells, and detect preclinical disease before it gets out of hand. What role will medical informatics play in this brave new world? Hint: Little data projects may be as important as big data projects such as gene sequencing. At a recent symposium on personalized medicine, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, chairman of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health at the University of Pennsylvania, questioned whether it would make more sense to target all the lifestyle mistakes that patients make rather than analyze genetic defects. His view: 'Personalized medicine misses the most important fact about modern society--little ill health and premature death is genetic, much more is lifestyle and social.' Is Emanuel a dinosaur or a pragmatist?"

Comments

Re:There would be no healthcare crisis in the U.S.

[Attila Dimedici]

That would be true if there was a healthcare crisis in the U.S.

Re:There would be no healthcare crisis in the U.S.

[FooAtWFU]

Give it another few years for Obamacare to come all the way online, and there may well be. ;)

(oblig. "I'll probably get modded down for this.")