What is personalized medicine?
Personalized medicine, also called individualized medicine or genomic medicine, is where genetic, biological, and environmental information about a specific patient is used to prevent, diagnose, and treat his or her disease.
Traditional medicine tries to mechanize the process of caring for patients by grouping them according to the clinical information available. From there, standardized protocols are followed with little variability between one patient and another. This achieves excellent productivity and effectiveness in the macro-management of patients, but sometimes this is not the best option for the particular patient.
Why should patients be treated with individualized medicine?
It is not lost on anyone that we do not feel the same about our meals or certain medications. Many times that difference is in our genes. Nowadays, we know of genetic variations that, when we have them, predispose us to the fact that certain medicines do not feel good, or that the optimum dose that should be given to us is not the same as the one that is usually given generally. Since this information exists and it is cheap to obtain, from our point of view there is no reason not to use it.
Effectiveness in the practice of medicine is based mainly on two variables:
- scientific knowledge about the disease and its treatment
- patient information
Of course, there are many more variables, such as access to different procedures and diagnostic tools. But at a historical level, these two variables are the ones that condition the evolution of effectiveness in the world of medicine. The more drug knows our clinical service, and the more it knows about us, the better we will do.
Why is personalized medicine not being used?
From this point onwards, depending on the clinical service, the insurance company and the hospital, protocols are used to decide which diagnostic tests are carried out on the patient (blood tests, x-rays, scans, PET, CT scans...) by the cost policy usually applied by insurance companies. Our vision at this point is that a large part of the medical/hospital community has become obsolete.
The first years after the first decoding of the human genome in 2003, any genetic test was above 20,000 euros, and scientists did not even know very well what to do with this information. Today for less than 200 euros, you can get a lot of very relevant information when making the right decisions for patients. Which drugs to give and which not to offer, which developments are most likely to be able to stop it in time and much more. Currently, thousands of euros are spent on various tests that fit perfectly into their industrialized protocols to get the most patients out in the least amount of time, and many clinicians who would like to be able to use these tools have their hands tied by insurance or a certain hospital's bottom line.
How can I get treated with personalized medicine or genomic medicine?
Personalized medicine is right around the corner, I don't know how much longer we will have to wait for it to become the standard, but it will come. Because when we see the evolution of those who have been treated individually, we will want it for ourselves.
The sequencing of the Exuma has gone from costing tens of thousands to less than a thousand. It is a once-in-a-lifetime analysis, and with the GenPatrol service, we will have the relevant information at our fingertips as science advances. Today, it is the most appropriate quality-price tool for personalized medicine.
With the information we provide you in our tests, we will be able to see our predisposition to an enormous amount of drugs that until now were given to us by gunfire. With the information we provide you in our tests, we can enter the world of personalized medicine through the big door. We will be able to focus preventive medicine on where we are most predisposed to get sick and thus have early diagnoses that, according to numerous studies, multiply between X5 and X10 the chances of healing.
It is possible that our insurance will not cover this type of genetic analysis, so it is up to each of us to decide to what extent we want to invest in our health.
How can having our DNA sequenced help us?
From prevention, with our genetic map, we will be able to know what diseases we are most predisposed to. Therefore we will be able to be more attentive and thus achieve an early diagnosis that multiplies by 5 to 10 the chances of survival
