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Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Collective Good at a Time of Medical Narcissism
Author(s) -
Sabatello Maya
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
hastings center report
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.515
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1552-146X
pISSN - 0093-0334
DOI - 10.1002/hast.1069
Subject(s) - context (archaeology) , psychology , distributive justice , personalized medicine , balance (ability) , precision medicine , genomic medicine , economic justice , sociology , social psychology , law , medicine , political science , history , genetics , archaeology , neuroscience , biology , pathology , computational biology
Not a single day goes by without some news about personalized medicine, especially in its genomic context (precision medicine). In tandem with the scientific excitement, however, come the cautionary notes. These include worries about Big Brother surveillance, concerns about the impact of genomic results on the psychosocial well‐being of patients and research subjects, and attention to issues of social and distributive justice . Personalised Medicine, Individual Choice and the Common Good, coedited by Britta van Beers, Sigrid Sterckx, and Donna Dickenson, falls squarely into this discourse with an aim to “fuel and stimulate the debate about personalised medicine and enable its participants to come to a more balanced understanding of the interests and values at stake.” At its core, the book laments the shift from “We Medicine” to “Me Medicine,” with ostensibly all authors highlighting that, on balance, the costs associated with “Me Medicine” far outweigh the benefits. This is both a strength and a weakness of the book.