Abstract
In light of the successful occupation of the term ‘person’ for Personalised Medicine, it is necessary to ask what different notions of personhood practically imply. This article examines two. The first is the reductionist molecular individual, embraced by PM enthusiasts. Here the person is a contradictory dividuum, oscillating between increased autonomy and a new, infantilising tech-paternalism. The second relies on a Christ-analogical distinction of two modes. The dramatic amplitude of personal absence-presence then unfolds throughout time. This provides the logic or spirit of the medical act. Drawing on the ethics of war, it will be recast as an arduous task of mending.
Highlights
Personalised or individualised medicine (PM) has been described as a revolution in medicine
What good is the best targeted therapy, if patients on the ward are treated like ‘numbers in a concentration camp’, as a nurse complained at a Royal Society of Medicine (RSM) meeting in 2015? The ‘revolution’ of PM may well be a crisis one shouldn’t let go to waste
Personalised Medicine is a set of technologies promising early diagnosis, molecular stratification and precision-medicines
Summary
Personalised or individualised medicine (PM) has been described as a revolution in medicine. One implication is that personhood only unfolds throughout time This entails the specific movement of medicine: as disease and death threaten to irreversibly divide the person, the medical act aids the restoration of a person’s always precarious distinction-in-unity of the social and biological. These two anthropologies imply a significant practical distinction: on the one hand an enthusiastic, hyped, but fruitless PM—what I call ‘enthusiastic PM’ (EPM)— and on the other hand a sobered-up personalised medicine (SPM) that is both instrumental and effective. Alex Mold, Making the Patient-Consumer: Patient Organisations and Health Consumerism in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015)
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