Personalized Medicine
Na’Tasha Slade
SCI 115
Professor Palaniswamy August 5, 2012

Personalized Medicine has great influence on the way we think towards identifying and managing healthcare problems and diseases. Personalize medicine aids in providing an in depth analysis of hereditary differences within genetically difference of people and also how it may affect the healthcare that they may need. With technology being modified daily the advancements in technology may improve the levels of personalize medicine by, giving details on someone metabolic, genetic, and proteinaceous profile that in the future be used to customize individual medical care. The concept of personalized medicine has broadened to include evaluation of your genetic risk of developing disease and determining how serious it may be as well as detecting diseases at much earlier stages—usually before you have symptoms. A personalized medicine approach will also tell you what medicines will work best for you, depending on many different factors, and reduce or eliminate the trial-and-error process of trying to find the right ones. A personalized medicine approach will better monitor disease and treatments and have a better chance of predicting outcomes of therapies and treatment approaches.
Personalized medicine usually involves a combination of genetic testing (to determine propensity for certain diseases); suggestions for lifestyle changes; detection of diseases at the molecular level; and customized treatments for diseases, rather than a "one size fits all" approach. It is still in its infancy but is likely to influence traditional medicine more and more over time.
The practical benefit of genetic technology for personalized medicine is that information in a person's genome may inform healthcare decisions, particularly the selection of certain drugs, says Dr. Geoffrey S. Ginsburg, Director of the Center for Personalized Medicine of the Duke University Health System. "Healthcare providers can use genetic information to design medical plans that both maximize health benefits and minimize the risk of disease," he adds (Cancio)
Other benefits of personalize medicine include the following:
1. Safer dosing options.
2. Reduce healthcare cost and medical expenditures.
3. Reduce negative drug side effects and tolerability issues.
4. Early diagnose and more effective intervention of disease s such as cancer.
A potential hazard of using genetic technology in personalized medicine is that patients may receive incorrect information about their disease risks. Depending on the seriousness of the faulty data, this could cause significant distress for the recipient and, in some limited circumstances, raise issues of liability for those who provide the false information. According to Doriane Coleman, Professor of Law at Duke Law School, the potential for liability even if genetic reports are negligently produced depends on recipients being able to show that they'd been harmed in some way. The drawback and limitations, on the other hand, include the possibility of inadvertent or deliberate disclosure of personal genetic information to inappropriate persons or other third parties and the possibility of discrimination based on this information. The disadvantages have been the subject of intense scrutiny over the past decade, so that carefully crafted protections for personal privacy and confidentiality of information are now the order of the day.

Bibliography
Cancio, C. (n.d.). How stuff works. Retrieved Aug 4, 2012 from http://health.howstuffworks.com/medicine/modern-treatments/genetic-technology-and-personalized-medicine2.htm