Personalized Medicine - Essay Example

"Personalized Medicine" is an exceptional example of a paper on health system.
When the human genome was decoded in 2003, the scientific community opened the floodgates in terms of new studies based upon the DNA makeup of a person's body. In the article Personalized Medicine by U.S. News's Health (2011) it is through a thorough understanding of each person's DNA strand, medical science may, in the future have the power to predict a person's predisposition to illness, certain medical conditions, and also how well our body can fight off diseases or metabolize food. In the realm of medical treatment, this scientific breakthrough means that medicines can now be individually geared towards a person's DNA in order to achieve optimal treatment success. is on this basis that Personalized Medicine has created its foundation. In fact, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2008) has declared that the future course of medical treatment and policies will be transformed by personalized medicine. Aside from simply considering the family history and lifestyle of a patient, doctors will now also look into genetic and molecular biology as parts of a more sophisticated and personalized medical treatment and strategies.

The Jackson Laboratory (2012) has also concluded that Personalized Medicine will fully benefit the patients of debilitating illnesses such as cancer, Alzheimer's, and diabetes. At the moment treatment of these illnesses fall under the ill-effective range. However, once Personalized Medicine has been perfected, the Jackson Laboratory predicts that the following benefits shall be enjoyed by patients across the board by:

• Shifting the emphasis in medicine from reaction to prevention
• predicting susceptibility to disease, improve disease detection, preempt disease progression
• Customizing disease prevention strategies
• Prescribing more effective drugs and avoiding prescribing drugs with unpredictable side effects
• Reduce the time, cost, and failure rate of pharmaceutical clinical trials and undermine patient care

Personalized Medicine should, in the future, according to The Jackson Laboratory (2012), allow the medical practitioners to map out the genetic constitution of an individual, paying close attention to disease prevention or delay by applying targeted medication before the disease or illness sets in.

Through Personalized Medicine holds a tremendous amount of promise in the field of individualized medical treatment, Dr Rydian Hapgood believes that the mere fact that each person carries a unique set of DNA strands that react differently to medical treatments means that Personalized Medicine will be hard to achieve without a greater understanding of the pharmacological makeup of a person's illness in relation to his DNA makeup.

Personalized Medicine works on the premise that our scientists and doctors, including the pharmaceutical companies all, understand how individual DNA strands work within a person and that they can manage to create drugs for treatments based upon that understanding. My biggest worry though is that this potential breakthrough in drug development and disease prevention will instead result in more orphaned illnesses and drugs as the manufacturers come to discover the percentages of society afflicted with certain illnesses. If there are not enough people with the same DNA affliction, then that group of society is out of luck in terms of medical treatment.  Personalized medicine would then seem to be more of a polarizing medical treatment than anything else.