Personalized medicine, also referred to as precision medicine, deals with a
clinical model that delineates patients into different groups based on their ethnicity,
lifestyle, food habits, medical history, drug reaction, comorbidity, the robustness of the
immune system, age, gender, and proneness to infection, overall psyche and attitude
towards life. Further, emotions, social interactions and life experiences culminating
into overall happiness play an important role in the life of a person. Thus, an
emotionally strong and happy person is usually healthy. Taking all these above factors
into consideration and with accurate diagnosis, a drug may be prescribed more in tune
with the uniqueness of the patient’s genome. Since everybody, whether diseased or
healthy, has a unique genome, this uniqueness must be utilized in deciding the drug,
dose and its long-term effects. Healing and cure should address the root cause of the
problem instead of working only on the symptoms to provide short-term relief. In
addition, repurposing of the drug which is not an old concept should also be carefully
explored because with this approach, a large number of already available drugs may be
used for a much wider number of diseases than the medicine originally developed for.
This will also help reduce the cost of the development of medicine. Finally, clinicians
and doctors should be sensitized to the concept of precision medicine and its less
obvious sub-disciplines. This is envisaged to provide better, more accurate diagnosis
and may result in better treatment. The medical field, besides being a deep science is
also an art starting from how to deal with diverse types of patients of different
backgrounds and educate them all the way to instill a sense of confidence and then to
prescribe the medicine to cure the disease. Seemingly, within the realm of precision
medicine, it is a huge task. However, it is possible to collect and analyze diagnostic
data to reach a consensus. This would require the involvement of clinical psychologists
and genetic counselors in a hospital setting ensuring that patient care is holistic, taking into account both the physical and psychological aspects of health. This integrated
approach can lead to improved patient care and long-term well-being.
Keywords: Demography, Epidemiology, Genome heterogeneity, Human psyche, Pain management, Precise medicine, System biology.
