Understanding Personalized Medicine

Before, when a patient is diagnosed with a certain cancer

, his physician will prescribe a medicine after considering the patient's weight, age, and medical history. The medicine may or may not be very effective as the physician is unsure of how your body would react to such medicines.

When the patient is not responding to the medicine, the physician will prescribe another one. This time, the combination of drugs is different. Still, after a week or two of having no positive effects, the patient goes back to the physician's clinic to inform. The doctor will prescribe another medicine of another combination to combat the disease. The change of prescribed medicine does not stop until the physician found the medicine that can make the body respond positively. This scenario is very common today. Physicians resort to trial-and error in finding the best cure for a disease.

The effects of this approach are many. For one, this may cost the patient a fortune, having to go back to the clinic to tell his doctor that the medicines prescribed are not effective. Seriously, the drug therapies for cancer are not inexpensive. For another, it may cost the patient time, which could have been spent in resting or recovering had the physician known at first stage which medicine would make his body respond well. It could also cause complications on the patients. Many of today's hospitalizations and deaths are accounted to serious adverse reactions from drugs.

With personalized medicine, however, it is different. Patients can save time. It can even accelerate the process of treatment and recovery. Before the physician prescribes a medicine, he may already have known that the patient's body would respond to it positively. This is done by genetic mapping or profiling. It is a test done to determine genetic variations of an individual. If during the genetic testing, the doctor found out that the drug would cause adverse effect, he would skip that medicine and consider another one.

With the evaluation and analysis of the genetic makeup of a patient, the physician will prescribe drug therapies which are formulated especially for his genetic makeup or for a small sub-group of patients having a similar genetic composition. But, personalized medicine goes beyond prescribing the right medicine on a personal level to a patient. It can help physician determine to which diseases certain individuals are predisposed, based on genetic profiling. The medical doctor may know that a person has already contracted certain disease before he even start manifesting the symptoms. Armed with such crucial information, the physician can devise a plan for prevention and cure.

Today, there are institutions that conduct genetic testing for personalized medicine. A few tests are now available to determine whether cancer patients or those afflicted with diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer's, eye vision like the macular degeneration and cardiovascular will respond or not to which drug therapies.

Personalized medicine is based on a premise that each individual is unique when it comes to DNA and genes. There are genetic variations that produce different genetic expressions. Each individual may have a different reaction to certain drugs. Scientists have long discovered that there is no 'one size fits all' medicine. Medicines may have different effects on different people.

by: Charles Godbout

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