Great future or greedy venture: Precision medicine needs philosophy

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Over the past decade, we have witnessed the initiation and implementation of precision medicine (PM), a discipline that promises to individualize and personalize medical management and treatment, rendering them ultimately more precise and effective. Despite of the continuing advances and numerous clinical applications, the potential of PM remains highly controversial, sparking heated debates about its future. METHOD: The present article reviews the philosophical issues and practical challenges that are critical to the feasibility and implementation of PM. OUTCOME: The explanation and argument about the relations between PM and computability, uncertainty as well as complexity, show that key foundational assumptions of PM might not be fully validated. CONCLUSION: The present analysis suggests that our current understanding of PM is probably oversimplified and too superficial. More efforts are needed to realize the hope that PM has elicited, rather than make the term just as a hype.

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