Real Personalized Medicine

As many as 50% of people with major depressive disorder don’t respond well to the first medication prescribed.  Antidepressant medicines can make you feel terrible if the wrong one is prescribed and feel great if the right one is chosen.  But choosing the right one can often take a lot of trial and error for a person experiencing depression.  You may be told it will be 2 weeks or more before a new medicine works.  You wait and wait.  The challenge can begin to feel insurmountable.  If it feels like there’s no easily measurable test for these medicines, that’s wrong.  Here’s why.  A pharmacogenetic test could provide some key information.   Pharmacogenetic testing measures and reports which copies you have of genes that affect the medicines you take. Your genes decide how your body responds to a medicine or how your body breaks down a medicine. For example, knowing about your genes can tell your doctor: Which medicine is likely to work...

When you have questions about a gene test result, many people turn to the internet for answers. You may find a flood of information. Some information you find online is accurate; some is not. A lot of information online is placed there by commercial labs who are marketing to you or to your doctor. By their nature, these labs may have a bias toward how test results are interpreted. Some online “information” is really an opinion. This blog is set up to be a bias-free space. Evidence-based practice is any practice that relies on published scientific evidence for decision-making. Evidence-based personalized medicine means looking at scientific evidence to interpret an individual person’s test results. We know that one-sized medicine doesn’t always fit. We now know a lot about how your genetics influences how your body breaks down medicines or how some medicines may act in your body. But honestly there is still a lot we don’t know, too! The goal of evidence-based personalized m...