Personalized Medicine Essay

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Amy Bauer 16 February 2011 SCI 115 Professor: Susan Kennedy Personalized Medicine Personalized medicine is a medical model emphasizing in general the customization of healthcare, that have decisions and practices that are being tailored to individual patients in whatever ways possible. Recently, this has mainly involved the systematic use of genetic or other information about an individual patient to select or optimize that patient's preventative; extension of traditional approaches to understanding and treating illness. Since the beginning of the study of medicine, physicians have employed evidence found through observation to make a diagnosis or to prescribe treatment. In the past, this was presumably tailored to each individual, but personalized medicine makes treatment more specific. Over the years of medical care have been focuses on standards of care based on studies. However, studies do not take into account the variability of individuals within a population. Personalized medicine seeks to provide an objective basis for consideration of such individual differences. Traditionally, personalized medicine has been limited to the consideration of a patient's family history, social circumstances, environment and behaviors in tailoring individual care. A key attribute of medical model is the development of companion diagnostics, which measure levels of proteins, genes or specific mutations are used to provide a specific therapy for an individual's condition by stratifying disease status, selecting the proper medication and tailoring dosages to that patient's specific needs. Additionally, such methods can be used to assess a patient's risk factor for a number of conditions and tailor individual preventative treatments. Stratified medicine has been used for the current approach. Examples of successful personalized treatments exist in the field of oncology.

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