Personalized Medicine Research Paper

650 Words3 Pages

“Personalized medicine heralds the start of an age of maintaining health as opposed to treating sickness […]” (p133). In “The Personalized Medicine Revolution: How Diagnosing and Treating Disease Are About to Change Forever,” written by Pieter Cullis, a revolution for the medical industry is on the horizon. Within the next 5-10 years clinical medicine will change strategies from treatment of disease to prevention. This strategy will be adopted using genetic and molecular personal information called the “molecular you.” The “molecular you” is determined by your sequenced genome, proteome, metabolome, and microbiome (p32). Due to the ever-changing technological advances of our time, this information is transmitted into a “digital you” consisting …show more content…

Routine personal monitoring and genetics will allow for detection of disease before onset leading to the prevention of fatal diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disorders (p131). Personalized medicine brings a new roles and ethical dilemmas for medical practitioners. Cullis describes personalized medicine as a form of medical treatment through one’s own monitoring and “molecular you” that greatly reduces health and aging related uncertainty. However, the current role of medical practitioners as a diagnosing and treating service will become …show more content…

Questions concerning quality of life and desired treatment are no longer the main obstacle. New questions arise with the availability and accessibility of genetic information including: should a doctor be required to forewarn a patient of any chronic, untreatable, or fatal ailments before onset (p86)? There may be no improvement on the quality of life for the patient to know how they may decease. Also, if incurable genetic predispositions for disease inheritance of a unborn child are easily determined and proven, does the doctor inform the parent thereby leading to a potential rise in abortion (75,102)? Can and should genetic disease be erased from the general population by in vitro fertilization and prenatal screening (p97, 102, 139)? When personalized medicine provides attainable, longer-lasting life, is it truly sustainable for the whole human population (p140)? Should doctors be allowed to share medical predispositions between family members or disclose paternal results (p98)? In the future of personalized medicine, uncertainty, disease, disorder, and abnormalities are past, but these changing medical roles and ethical challenges will test and provide new legal boundaries and technologies that are incomprehensible until