In honor of last week’s conference at Stanford University on Personalized Medicine, at #OMFScienceWednesday we ask the question: What is personalized health?
Whether you call it personalized medicine, precision health, or P4 medicine, we are talking about a current revolution in the way health and disease are being studied, and the way healthcare is being practiced. This means we are moving away from the one-size-fits-all approach, and towards more tailored therapies that account for individual variations at the clinical and molecular level. This means we are aiming to predict the risk and eventually prevent the onset of disease. This means a data-driven revolution, that uses the cutting-edge molecular technologies we talked about last week and sophisticated big data analysis, to predict the best ways to treat disease and maintain health in each person. This means empowering patients to take a more active role in their own healthcare. This means focusing on turning from reactive (treating disease) to proactive (maintaining wellness).