Not-So-Personalized Medicine

Jack E. James, who appears to hail from either Reykjavik University in Iceland or the National University of Ireland in Galway, or both, kindly sent me a copy of a paper published in June in the European Journal of Epidemiology.

The paper addresses "personalized medicine" from the perspectives of Julian Tudor Hart's "inverse care law" and Don Light and yours truly's "inverse benefit law."

James starts off reminding us of the promise of personalized medicine: instead of "one size fits all," we will have "the right drug to the right patient at the right time." Instead of 100 people getting a drug, and 5 of them having a nasty allergic reaction to it, we'd get the message in advance that these particular 5 folks should not be given that drug. Personalized medicine seems to be quite effective nowadays, for example, in breast cancer treatment, where patients are tested and their tumors are found to be sensitive or insensitive to various chemotherapies before they are administered.

James goes on to discuss personalized medicine in some depth...