In honor of this week’s conference at Stanford University, on this #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 to therapies, and towards more tailored ones 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).
Personalized health approaches to research are especially exciting in ME / CFS because of how complex and variable this disease is across patients. This is why OMF funded the big data study on severely ill patients (/mecfs-severely-ill-big-data-study/). We already know that different patients respond to different treatments, and personalized health research will help us not only to understand why that is, but to find even better treatments or combinations thereof. This is already starting to happen in cancer, where genome sequence information is used to select the most effective drugs for individual patients.
Much of the research OMF supports takes place at Stanford Medicine. Read more about Stanford Medicine’s commitment to precision health in research, in Dean Lloyd Minor’s Forbes op-ed: http://med.stanford.edu/…/dean-minor-on-precision-health.ht…
Dean Minor is now kicking off the Personalized Health conference at Stanford University, and Ron Davis will be speaking there about ME / CFS research on Friday afternoon. See the entire program here: https://app.certain.com/profile/web/index.cfm… and follow the live Twitter feed here: http://twitter.com/hashtag/PH17
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