On January 30, 2015, former President Barack Obama
addressed a crowd in the East Wing of the White House.
Among the hoard of excited onlookers was the former Surgeon
General, the former Science Advisor, as well as representatives
from the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes
of Health. This gathering of minds was the who's who of modern
health care. The topic at hand was precision medicine.
"You can match a blood transfusion to a blood type… What
if matching a cancer cure to our genetic code was just as
easy, just as standard? What if figuring out the right dose of
medicine was as simple as taking our temperature? That's the
promise of precision medicine," President Obama said.
Precision medicine is a new approach to disease prevention
and treatment that takes into account a patient's genes,
environment and lifestyle, and customizes medical decisions
based on that information. This is a departure from traditional
medicine, wherein medical decisions were made for patients
based on the typical characteristics of the disease they have,
rather than their bodies' unique characteristics in relation to
that disease.
THE FUTURE OF
PRECISION MEDICINE
BY BRENNA HOLLAND
VUE ON WELLNESS
V U E N J . C O M
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