When a person is diagnosed with a disease, oftentimes their recommended course of treatment is not unlike that of another patient suffering from the same ailment. But what may be effective – and safe – for one person may not necessarily be good for another.
That’s where precision medicine comes into play.
What is Precision Medicine?
Rather than blanket treatments for various medical issues based on the average person, “precision medicine” is designed to take an individual’s genetics, environment, and lifestyle into consideration when tailoring a course of treatment.
While factors like age, gender, pre-existing conditions, and other elements are considered when establishing a treatment plan, precision medicine offers more reliable information upon which physicians can make better decisions about a particular remedy.
Combining genetic testing with clinical, pharmaceutical, and demographic data, researchers can assess specific treatments and pinpoint the exact genetic data that could be associated with the effectiveness – or lack thereof – of the chosen treatment.
From there, clinical trials can be conducted to analyze and substantiate these theories.
Medical practitioners strive to provide effective care and treatment for their patients, and that can often involve experimenting with various treatments and making tweaks as required to ensure a positive outcome.
But with the advent of precision medicine, healthcare professionals can make use of genetic testing, electronic health data, and analytics to develop razor-focused and highly customized medicine for individual patients. In fact, precision medicine is showing promise in dealing with diseases that have long been without a cure or highly effective treatment.
Deadly Diseases May Be Prime Targets For Precision Medicine
Diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, which have no known cure, could be targeted with precision medicine and the elements involved in this modern approach. Understanding the relationships between genes, pharmaceuticals, lifestyles, and different populations could be the key to unlocking the potential to come up with much more effective treatments for debilitating diseases that currently are not available.
Precision medicine eliminates the one-size-fits-all approach that is often applied to the average individual, and instead considers specific traits of individuals and their socioeconomic statuses and lifestyles. It’s a unique approach that may help transform modern-day medicine.
