What is Personalized Medicine?

In the day and age where you can customize everything from your ringtone to your laptop to your car, why not personalize your healthcare too?  Years ago physicians had to rely on reactive measures of family history and overt symptoms to diagnose disease. Treatment centered around clinical studies that looked at broad groups of patients from different backgrounds and with different risk factors to determine the best course of action. Today physicians can take a more proactive approach to medicine, and based on an individual's unique genetic makeup in combination with other characteristics such as height, weight, age, sex, and environmental  factors, determine disease risk and make more informed medical decisions. This practice is known as personalized medicine and will likely become the standard of care in the not-so-distant future.  Due in large part to advances in genotyping, scientists are able to genetically identify individuals at higher risk for common diseases and customize treatment options including which medications might work best.  Personalized medicine also offers physicians the potential to improve the quality of care through more precise diagnostics while saving insurance companies money on ineffective and unnecessary treatments. Not to mention patients benefit from personalized medicine in that they will likely experience fewer side effects and adverse events associated with many treatment options. Overall personalized medicine offers many advantages to the one-size-fits-all approach to medicine and will likely gain widespread acceptance in the coming years.