Published in:
01-12-2018 | Editorial
Precision in health care
Authors:
Henk ten Have, Bert Gordijn
Published in:
Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy
|
Issue 4/2018
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Excerpt
In 2015, President Obama launched the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI). The promise of this Initiative is that in the future medicine will be unique and personalised. Healthcare providers can ‘customize’ treatment and prevention strategies to the unique characteristics of people. The mission statement of the PMI is: “To enable a new era of medicine through research, technology, and policies that empower patients, researchers, and providers to work together toward development of individualized care” (Whitehouse
2016). While the website of PMI presents hallelujah stories in which precision medicine is already saving lives (see:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/precision-medicine), what is missing is information and research data concerning the interconnections between human biology, behavior, genetics and environment. The Initiative is now transformed into a research project (“All of Us”; see:
https://allofus.nih.gov/) to collect genetic and health data from one million volunteers by 2022. …
