What Card Can I Do With A Sore Knee.

Personalized Medicine: the end of the healing art or an unprecedented revolution 2.0

Yesterday I went to meet one of these posters hanging nobody knows who or when, but inviting to stop for a minute in the busy hospital life. And thank goodness I read it because it announced a conference-debate ( View Medical Journal News in 04/02/2011) to be held the same day afternoon. The talk question was about Personalized Medicine, and invited speakers, illustrious in their fields, as asserted by the fact that the conference was sponsored nothing more and nothing less than the Latin American editor of Nature . So I put aside my chores and I decided to attend evening.

The decision could not be better. There was much talk about the trial and error method of treatment failure, medical education, global health policy, genetics and web 2.0. The idea he came home was that personalized medicine is intended to be a new therapeutic paradigm based in determinations of native and altered genome of the cells of a patient, designed to show your body's response against the range of treatments known to achieve an efficient model of health, which is based treatment with evidence that drugs administered have the desired effect and be the best available for the patient.

The vision they offered, I think unintentionally, was that of the demise of Medicine as an art model, as an expression of wisdom to the discretion of the individual, to become merely a scheduled execution, determined solely by genome and epigenome of each patient, where the reasoning and intuition have no place and the figure of the doctor loses its therapeutic effect. Personalized Medicine will hang many gowns. Patients do not want a blood count and biochemistry, not an X-ray, and even less surface exploration at the hands of one person. Want a complete study of the alphabet of its own existence, and as they say, it may take less than a decade of little more than half a dollar value today.

Perhaps that is the future of our profession. If true, we expect some exciting and wonderful years. However, although deeply excite me all these changes, I'll be this Saturday on duty in the ER, I have taken note and will try to do their best to fill gaps in medicine today with affection and compassion that may miss tomorrow.