Inside today's data-driven personalized medicine, and the time,
effort, and information required from patients to make it a reality
Medicine has been personal long before the concept of "personalized
medicine" became popular. Health professionals have always taken into
consideration the individual characteristics of their patients when
diagnosing, and treating them. Patients have cared for themselves and
for each other, contributed to medical research, and advocated for new
treatments. Given this history, why has the notion of personalized
medicine gained so much traction at the beginning of the new millennium?
Personalized Medicine investigates the recent movement for patients'
involvement in how they are treated, diagnosed, and medicated; a
movement that accompanies the increasingly popular idea that people
should be proactive, well-informed participants in their own healthcare.
While it is often the case that participatory practices in medicine are
celebrated as instances of patient empowerment or, alternatively, are
dismissed as cases of patient exploitation, Barbara Prainsack challenges
these views to illustrate how personalized medicine can give rise to a
technology-focused individualism, yet also present new opportunities to
strengthen solidarity. Facing the future, this book reveals how medicine
informed by digital, quantified, and computable information is already
changing the personalization movement, providing a contemporary twist on
how medical symptoms or ailments are shared and discussed in society.
Bringing together empirical work and critical scholarship from medicine,
public health, data governance, bioethics, and digital sociology,
Personalized Medicine analyzes the challenges of personalization
driven by patient work and data. This compelling volume proposes an
understanding that uses novel technological practices to foreground the
needs and interests of patients, instead of being ruled by them.
