With personalization happening everywhere around the world, nowadays even personalized medicines are also offered.
But what is personalized medicine?
As the name suggests, receiving personalized medication for the treatment of diseases is called personalized medicine.
According to National Cancer Institute (NIH), “A form of medicine that uses information about a person’s genes, proteins, and environment to prevent, diagnose, and treat disease.”
“Precision medicine,” “stratified medicine,” “targeted medicine,” and “pharmacogenomics,” are occasionally used interchangeably with personalized medicine.
But why should I opt for it?
A common question which keeps hindering people from using these medicines is why should I use it, what will I benefit from using it?
Every person’s body type is different and it reacts differently to diverse medicines received. Based on the different reactions, a body undergoes when receiving treatment, these medicines are prescribed to the patient by the healthcare professionals.
In short, one can tell as one man’s meat, is another man’s poison.
If one has got severe reactions and side-effects to a particular reaction, does not mean that another person will also suffer the same.
There are various reasons why one can utilize the medicine. Some of them include:
- Avoiding prescribing drugs with predictable side effects:
The biggest reason for one taking in personalized medicine is that one can avoid drugs which have side-effects on them. By avoiding drug causing side-effects, one can not only preserve their health but even their wealth.
- Reducing the time, cost and failure rate of pharmaceutical clinical trials:
According to World Health Organization, “a clinical trial is any research study that prospectively assigns human participants or groups of humans to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects on health outcomes”.
The problem of doing pharmaceutical clinical trials is that there is majority of wastage of time, cost, and failure.
Subsequently, by employing the personalized medicines one can save a lot of time, revenue and failure rate as well.
- Accessing, Monitoring and Controlling:
What can be more comforting than a person being able to access, monitor and control his own health? Yes, with personalized all this possible.
Personalized medicine is technology driven and thoroughly patient-centered. It is the patient’s personal molecular data that guides diagnosis and treatment. With it, the patients of the future will be more informed about their health and can have access to more of their own health data than previously.
Therefore, personalized medicine is the future of the pharmaceutical industry.
- Predicting susceptibility to disease:
Predictive medicine is a field of medicine that involves predicting the probability of occurrence of a disease and introducing preventive measures so as to either prevent the disease or decrease its impact upon the patient.
So, personalized medicines are very much helpful in forecasting the probability of occurrence of a disease
