Thanks to modern technology and medicine, medical treatments today come in many different shapes and sizes. Medicine used to take a one-size fits all approach to treating patients to varying degrees of success. Generic medication has many benefits including easier and cheaper production and distribution. Although there are benefits to generic medication it may not always be the best solution.

Recently, medicine has taken a more personalized approach to treating patients. Precision, or personalized, medicine, is any kind of treatment that is tailored to fit the needs of the individual, rather than a group. A lot goes into producing and using personalized medicines, so if you’re looking to learn more about them, you’ve come to the right place. Here are the top 4 things you need to know about personalized medication to help catch you up to speed.

Personalized medication helps individuals with a wide variety of medical issues. It provides hand-crafted medication uniquely suitable for each patient. Your DNA and genes are responsible for how you react to a certain drug and treatment, as well as your predisposition to certain conditions. By analyzing this, researchers are able to identify suitable medicine for you as well as other valuable information.

Precision medication and testing can uncover genetic disorders, predict the outcome of certain neurological conditions, and find the ideal treatment for you. Precision medication might be the future of medicine, so it’s important to understand how it works.

Now that you know how it works, the next thing you need to know about personalized medication is where you can find it. As the name suggests, you won’t be able to find it on just any old shelf in any old pharmacy. Precision medicine needs to be researched and compounded, in special pharmacies. Look for a company or pharmacy that offers compounding if you’re looking for personalized medication. After running a few tests, the pharmacists, researchers, or doctors, will be able to tell you exactly what you need and whether they can provide it. The more people get on board with precision mediation, the more readily available it will become in the future.

If you’re still not convinced of the benefits of modern personalized medication, here are the top advantages of this technique. Many people are bound to suffer the harmful side effects of specific treatments or medication. With personalized medication, you can avoid any harmful reactions or side effects by knowing exactly what you need and what to avoid.

Personalized medication also helps people who have serious, life-threatening conditions. It cuts down the research time so that patients can get treatment faster and improves the efficiency of medical care. One screening helps with the early diagnosis and treatment of certain cancers, neurological disorders. As a patient, precision medicine helps you get cheaper treatment. Precision mediation cuts out the middle steps to finding your treatment and saves you money along the way.

As with many things in life and medicine, precision medication is not free of its faults. There are a few drawbacks of personalized medication, so to make the most informed decision, you need to be aware of them. The biggest issue with personalized medication is that a lot needs to be changed to the current medical infrastructure to make room for it. Hospitals and researchers need to change the way they collect, store, and access medical data.

For personalized medication to reach its fullest potential, certain laws need to change. They need to be adapted to fit the need of amassing large amounts of genomic data. It will also need large amounts of funding to support the scope of the necessary research. Implementing these changes takes a lot of time and patience. The current environment is not equipped to support a transfer into personalized medication just yet.

So there you have it. Now you’re all caught up on what personalized medication is, how it works, and what its advantages and drawbacks are. Specialized pharmacies and companies produce personalized medication to fit each patient's specific needs. This medication focuses on specialized, preventative care and could be the future of medicine. The benefits of personalized medication include quicker and more efficient treatment. Fewer harmful side effects, early diagnosis, and treatment for life-threatening conditions as well.

As useful as the personalized medication is, it would need a lot of time, money, effort, and change to be implemented in the current environment. Laws for data storage need to be changed and more money needs to be put towards research and development. There’s still a lot of work to be done until the world is ready to make the switch to a more personalized approach to medicine.