Lately, there has been an increase in the usage of personalized medicines and individual genetic modifications. This essay will discuss this treatment models’ benefits such as treatment specificity, but also its drawbacks such as affordability and privacy.
It is proven that medicines that are specialized for a person increases the speed and the accuracy of the treatment. It prevents the trial and error phase of a certain medicine for a certain person by providing tailored drugs to a specific need of the patient. For example, a patient experiencing chronic fatigue who also has a genetic susceptibility for depression gets a personalized drug for their symptom rather than a general one. Therefore, it can be said that the improvement rate of the symptoms with this new method is much more higher compared to the traditional treatment methods.
On the other hand, this newly rising field has some disadvantages that may push back the patient. When the treatment is specialized for a patient the price of it increases and the availability becomes limited, making it hard to access by larger groups of patients. This causes inequality of accessability in healthcare which can give rise to ethical problems. For example, a personalized cancer treatment can be proven effective but people who are living in the rural area may not have access to it, leaving them untreated. Also, genetic modification requires the patients genetic codes which may lead to risky situations such as genetic theft, especially in an era where AI is prominent.
In conclusion, this new age of medicine may be very effective in curing certain patients’ health problems, but there are notable issues such as the affordability of the medicine, accessibility to treatment and the privacy of genetic data that has to be addressed.