Are We Being Misled About Precision Medicine?
By Liz Szabo
NY Times, September 11, 2018
Link
Doctors
and hospitals love to talk about the patients they’ve saved with precision
medicine, and reporters love to write about them. But the people who die still
vastly outnumber the rare successes.
“There
are very few instances in which we can look at a genomic test and pick a drug
off the shelf and say, ‘That will work,’” said Dr. Nikhil Wagle, a cancer
specialist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston who helped develop
precision-medicine tests. “That’s our goal in the long run, but in 2018 we’re
not there yet.”
Failed
precision medicine studies received almost no news coverage. Against this backdrop
of hope and desperation, how are patients supposed to make informed decisions?
The
phrase “precision medicine” suggests a high rate of success. While its
successes should be celebrated, its failures must be acknowledged, reminding us
how much is left to learn.
[This is a great overview of the rapidly growing field of "precision medicine." The hype cannot be ignored.]
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