Chapter 7
Personalized Medicine
As medical understanding evolves, patient health becomes increasingly dependent on clinicians leveraging these advances. Current clinical medicine focuses on the patient’s clinical manifestation of disease through symptoms and signs, medical and family history, and clinical data from labs and imaging (often referred to as the patient’s phenotype). However, two patients with similar symptoms and personal characteristics may respond differently to the same treatment due to differences in the genetic makeup that are not captured by current clinical assessments. If a patient’s genetic makeup were taken into account, clinicians would be able to further personalize treatments and ensure optimal medical outcomes. The ...
