One of the most basic problems in our health care system is treating the “average person.” This approach is “Penny wise an Pound foolish.” Fortunately, there is plenty of science ready for prime time, as soon as the generation that now controls the system dies off. Yes, that is the only way societies change.
I have been tracking these new findings since I graduated from medical School in 1984. They happen to be very old concepts we forgot about through the pharmaceutical revolution of the fifties, and sixties. Said revolution is said to be “petering out”[1] to yield to the concepts outlined in the article below. I have highlighted the points you have been reading about in these blogs and newsletter.
As good as the article is, it leaves out two critical points: (1) Each of us has a Microbiome that is as distinct to us as our finger prints. (2) Our genetic material is highly dependent on the Microbiome. You read right: your vaunted DNA gets its marching orders from the gut bacteria you may be treating poorly by feeding them bad food. Translation: we are what we eat. Read about EPIGENETICS if you wish to know more about this.
It is my New Year wish to you that you may find the energy, and conviction to apply them in your life and the lives of your loved ones.
Microbiome at the Frontier of Personalized Medicine. J. Mayo Clinic Proceedings December 2017;92:1855–1864
“The genomic revolution promises to transform our approach to treat patients by individualizing treatments, reducing adverse events, and decreasing health care costs. The early advances using this have been realized primarily by optimizing preventive and therapeutic approaches in cancer using human genome sequencing. The ability to characterize the microbiome, which includes all the microbes that reside within and upon us and all their genetic elements, using next-generation sequencing allows us to now incorporate this important contributor to human disease into developing new preventive and therapeutic strategies. In this review we highlight the importance of the microbiome in all aspects of human disease, including pathogenesis, phenotype, prognosis, and response to treatment, as well as their role as diagnostic and therapeutic biomarkers. We provide a role for next-generation sequencing in both precise microbial identification of infectious diseases and characterization of microbial communities and their function. Taken together, the microbiome is emerging as an integral part of precision medicine approach as it not only contributes to interindividual variability in all aspects of a disease but also represents a potentially modifiable factor that is amenable to targeting by therapeutics.”
- . Science 2002;296:698 ↑
