The Pros And Cons Of Personalized Medicine

930 Words4 Pages

By stratifying patients into unique subgroups based on their specific molecular characteristics, Personalized medicine aids in planning the treatment.[26]
It also avoids unnecessary side effects and toxicity of treatment in those individuals who are predicted to be ‘non responders’ to a particular targeted therapy. By this modality, non responders could be stratified into alternate subgroups for personalized therapy.
Furthermore an expectation of who will respond and will not respond to a particular treatment, will have a great effect on how clinical trials are designed and carried out, resulting in reducing their costs and failures. Ultimately, personalized medicine is expected to result in overall reduction in the cost of health care making …show more content…

However all these drawbacks will be far offset by the potential benefits derived from individualized treatment, such as more effective treatment, reduced incidence of adverse drug reactions and improved quality of care of the patient. [21]
Despite some of the concerns noted above, personalized medicine is the way forward. It is a melding of traditional (eg: personalized history, examination and laboratory tests) and novel approaches (eg: genotyping, genomic evaluations). It uses the science of prediction, modern therapeutics principles and prevention which optimizes active participation of patients in their care. Treating the patient as a person and not just their illness is also an emotional element of this approach.[25]
Personalized or the molecular medicine has brought tremendous progress in the understanding and management of diseases over the past decade and the concept of personalized medicine will have significant impact on medical and dental practice and is gradually included as an integral component of management plan. This inevitably result in effective treatment and reducing side effects for patient and will have the motivation to engage in lifestyle choices and maintenance of health to compensate for their genetic