For
many years the field of medicine has utilized the one size fits all approach
for ridding people of their aches and pains. Physicians have looked at the patient
population as a whole. Although in many cases this approach has been successful,
studies show a new type of medicine called precision medicine is the way of the
future. Precision medicine focuses on the patient as an individual. Factors such
as genetics, lifestyle, environment all play a role in treatment. This movement
will allow physicians and researchers to fine tune their treatment options. In 2015
““I'm launching a new Precision Medicine
Initiative to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes — and
to give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep
ourselves and our families healthier.” - President Obama 2015 State of the
Union”
Genetics play a big role in
medicine. We can now sequence a patient’s genome and use it as a reference to
find potential diseases one may be susceptible to. This also aids in giving the
patient the right type of medication and treatment plan. In many cases one
medicine may work better than the other. Utilizing genetic information will
change how physicians treat patients because it offers a solution to patients
who may be unresponsive to certain drugs.
Lifestyle and patient health go hand
in hand. The way the patient lives his or her life will ultimately contribute
to their overall health. This factor takes into account variables such as
smoking, drinking, eating habits, exercise, and sleep. By collecting these
variables physicians can look at individual patients and determine the best
course of action to take when deciding on a treatment plan. Every patient lives
their lives in a different way, and being able to monitor these lifestyle
variables will allow the patients to be much more precise and focused on the
actual problem.
The patient’s environment can determine
a lot about the susceptibility to certain diseases. By learning the types of environmental
variables a patient is exposed to physicians can have a better idea of learning
which areas may harbor more or less toxins. For example, living in an
industrial area may cause an increase in the susceptibility of developing lung
cancer some time in life.
Being able to collect this data also opens new
avenues to research. The only question left to answer is how can we really
collect this data? Many mobile app developers are paving the path for precision
medicine. They hope to utilize the many tools such as “Apples Research Kit” framework
gives developers, and create a health data collection app. In the grand scheme
of things, they expect the application to collect important lifestyle variables
which may, in one way or another, lead to streamlining the workload of
physicians, and help raise the standard of care. Variables such as hours of
sleep, amount of exercise, and levels of stress, may be helpful in determining
the overall health of a patient before a full diagnostic check up can be
conducted by a physician. Other variables which may be of interest to
researchers can be integrated as well, allowing researcher and physicians to
come together and narrow down on creating the best possible treatment plan
available. Precision Medicine truly is the future.
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1 comment:
It's amazing how far medicine has come. Medicine, as you said has become far more focused on the individual in recent years. Increased knowledge of genetics and confounding factors like lifestyle play and equally important role in the health of an individual. You make a good point when you say that with all of the new variables we've discovered recently that affect a person's health, we need better ways to track all of those variables to deliver the best possible treatment. Can you think of any other ideas besides the apples research kit, to collect this data?
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