Friday, November 21, 2014

Stratified Medicine to Improve UK National Health Service





Stratified Medicine, also known as Personalized Medicine, is medicine specifically tailored for an individual.  The medicine works off the genome sequence of individuals (being everyone has a unique genome) allowing for more efficient drugs with fewer side effects, if any.  Doctors can use a person’s genome to determine diseases caused by mutations.  In addition to being able to diagnose a patient, genomes have the potential to inform doctors what drugs work.  It is with this information Stratified Medicine gets to shine.  Knowing how drugs will work on person will increase the chances of finding the right drug sooner and overall increase the number of lives saved.

                  

A survey of UK health professionals shows increased interest in the use of non-cancer stratified medicine for.  Patients have also shown interest, believing it gives patients access to treatments they otherwise wouldn't have.  The medicine has already made significant impact on the UK’s National Health Service, without being used for cancer.  The potential of using stratified medicine in conjunction with advance cancer treatments is vast.  However, there are some problems with implementing stratified medicine as the norm.  While there is an increased interest among health professionals, they agree the health system would have to change to support the use of stratified medicine.  The change might be slow but the use of stratified medicine could advance the medical world further.
              
                  


The UK has a very special opportunity to advance their health care system, and set the example for the rest of the world.  I personally hope they can make the change to incorporate stratified medicine.  It will allow the world to see how useful (or useless) it could be and see if it is worth utilizing.  I see the use of these types of drugs to be the advancement of the medical world, with large potential to save numerous lives.

1 comment:

  1. I had no idea a concept of stratified medicine was possible or useful! As one who is interested in pursuing an education in medicine i found this topic extremely intriguing and caused thoughts of whether this could be an interesting career choice. Thanks to the enlightenment from this article i would like to read more on stratified medicine because the concept is interesting to me.

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