Personalized Medecine Term Paper of the Pros and Cons Essay

How Will Genetic Technology Shape Personalized Medicine / what are the Benefits?

What is personalized medicine? “Medicine using genetic profile: the prevention, detection, and treatment of disease taking into account a person’s unique genetic profile”1.With the ever changing and mixing of different racial backgrounds, the need to make medicines that are more suited to the individuals that consume them will keep the drug makers of the future very busy. Healthcare is tailored to the term of personalized medicine when it pertains to humans and the benefits that they bring.

The whole meaning is to take the different ways certain diseases affect a certain individual of a common ethic background. With the knowledge of what disease you may develop in your life, you can prevent some hardship by conducting your life a little different. By knowing what your risk are this will enable you to address the problem before it may come up. By knowing what your genome or your DNA makeup, doctors can prescribe a certain selection of medicine to help prevent life altering medical conditions.

The technology can help healthcare provider to maximize health benefits and minimize the risk of disease. So this will be the main benefit to this genetic testing.

What are some Drawbacks and Limitations of this Approach to Human Medicine?

What are some drawbacks? When using genetic technology in personalized medicine is that some patients may receive incorrect information about their disease risk. This will bring up liability issue for them providing and prescribing the wrong preventive drug that may cause the individual to have severe to fatal side effects. The information can be falsely given but the patient has the burden of proof when it comes to filling a claim for negligence. This genetic testing that would lead to personalized medicine also causes the potential risk of stress on a patient when you put the thought into their heads that they may contract a certain disease that may be life threatening. There are many other drawbacks. The question of how accurate the tests are comes into play, being that there is no accuracy measurement in place for most.

When given the results “Say you are tested for the potential for lung cancer, and learn that you might develop it someday. You decide not to smoke and you don’t develop it. But you can’t now know whether the test was right or wrong to begin with because you took steps not to develop it.”(Torrey, 2010) You also need someone who is trained in translating the results for you. Also your privacy is really not yours because you’re DNA can also be like your social and be kept, sold, and they even may us it however they see fit for their personal gain. The HIPPA laws don’t cover genetic testing so you’re not protected at all. The main drawback right now is that they aren’t effective enough in the early stages of the development. In the future with more test and better laws in place Genetic testing will make the personalized healthcare business boom.

Reference
1. Discovery Health: Personalized Medicine, Julie Brown 2010 Retrieved from
http://health.howstuffworks.com/medicine/modern-treatments/genetic-technology 2. Teichler-Zallen, D. (2008). To Test or Not to Test: A Guide to Genetic Screening and Risk.
Rutgers University Press
3. Spandorfer, J. (2010). Professionalism in Medicine: A Case-based Guide for Medical Students. Cambridge University Press.

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