Precision medicine has been on the horizon for several years. How many times have you wondered whether medical advice or treatment was right for you? Not because it was recommended by someone on your medical team or because it was trending in your community or our culture but because it was truly right for you, specifically. Precision medicine is defined by dictionary.com as ‘medical care designed to optimize efficiency or therapeutic benefit for particular groups of patients especially by using genetic or molecular profiling. It is a medical model that separates people into different groups – with medical decisions, practices, interventions and/or products tailored to you based on your predicted response or risk of disease.’

By focusing on more personalized medicine, we can trust that we are receiving the most accurate medical information to be able to make informed decisions about our health. But how does precision medicine evolve? How can we take ownership of our unique genetic makeup? By understanding the story our genes tell and taking a closer look at what that story reflects. There are several ways to learn more about your genetic makeup. There are many paid resources available that will take a sample of your DNA and return the findings to you. These offer insights into your genetic predisposition to disease and could lead to intervention to prevent or minimize the impact of these conditions. According to the National Institutes of Health, ‘predictive or predispositional genetic testing can identify individuals at risk of getting a disease prior to the onset of symptoms. These tests are particularly useful if an individual has a family history of a specific disease and an intervention is available to prevent the onset of disease or minimize disease severity.’

Participating in genetic research is the next and most valuable step in propelling personalized medicine forward. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of researchers studying specific genetic conditions that tie us all together in infinite ways and the only way to know the impact of the findings is when we join one of these research studies. Imagine precision medicine as an infinite web of connections where each of us plays a critical part of the whole’s collective success. The future of healthcare depends on our ability to hold a mirror to our genetics and a willingness to share that story with the scientific community and the world at large.

Are you ready to take a step toward precision medicine? Join the BioLinked Registry.