Personalized medicine uses advanced and evolving understanding of genetics to make medical interventions safer and more effective. With genetic science, doctors are able to target medications and procedures for patients directly, creating an unprecedented "personalized" approach to medicine. Traditional allopathic medicine relies on empirical research that generalizes results for an entire population. This has led to problems related to patient side effects, some of which are serious. As the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of General Medical Sciences) points out, the "one-size-fits-all" approach to prescribing medicines that continues to characterize modern health care is flawed because doctors "usually started with standard doses, and then observed how patients responded," ("Personalized Medicines Fact Sheet," 2012). Unfortunately, this meant also that doctors "changed the doses or drugs by a trial and error process" that could be uncomfortable, costly, and time consuming ("Personalized Medicines Fact Sheet," 2012). Until the completion of the Human Genome...
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