Personalized Medicine - Empowered Patients in the 21st Century? (Broché)

Personalized Medicine investigates the recent movement for patients' involvement in how they are treated, diagnosed, and medicated, a movement that accompanies the increasingly popular idea that people should be proactive and well-informed participants in their own health care. While it is often the case that participatory practices in medicine are celebrated as instances of patient empowerment or, alternatively, are dismissed as cases of patient exploitation, Barbara Prainsack challenges these views to illustrate how personalized medicine can give rise to a technology-focused individualism yet also present new opportunities to strengthen solidarity.
Facing the future, this book reveals how medicine informed by digital, quantified, and computable information underpins the personalization movement, providing a contemporary twist on how medical symptoms or ailments are shared and discussed in society. Bringing together empirical work and critical scholarship from medicine, public health, data governance, bioethics, and digital sociology, Personalized Medicine analyzes the challenges of personalization driven by patient work and data.
This compelling volume proposes an alternative understanding of personalization that uses novel technological practices to foreground the needs and interests of patients instead of being ruled by these technologies.