Sunday, February 1, 2015

Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative

You can go back 15 years at least in my online class transcripts a find my monologue on tailored medicine, something so radical I was criticized for the idea.  Now comes the president of the USA:
Most medical treatments have been designed for the “average patient.” As a result of this “one-size-fits-all-approach,” treatments can be very successful for some patients but not for others.  This is changing with the emergence of precision medicine, an innovative approach to disease prevention and treatment that takes into account individual differences in people’s genes, environments, and lifestyles.  Precision medicine gives clinicians tools to better understand the complex mechanisms underlying a patient’s health, disease, or condition, and to better predict which treatments will be most effective. 
This is nothing new.  He wants $215 million to get in front of this.  We need exactly zero dollars to make this happen.  If we were to deregulate medicine, this is exactly where we would go, and it would revive the USA economy just as a deregulation-lite of telephones back in 1982 gave us the unforeseeable "new" of cheap cell phones and the internet & www.  Countless unemployed would find work immediately, our exports would boom, meritocracy would win out.  But when they want $215 million, they want it for lockdown, not for expansion.

What militate against this in USA -

The FDA...  the FDA is a regulator captured by the regulated.  I has hundreds of millions to spend on terrifying people that innovation will maim and kill them.  Their job #1 is to keep America safe for big medicine.

USDA... deregulation in medicine would extend to livestock, veterinarian medicine.  It is a crime to test for mad cow disease as a part of an export program.  It is a crime to acquire a mad cow disease test kit that was not gained by licensed permission from the USDA.

Patents...  Orwell warned the USA would use totalitarian thought control, Huxley warned it would use totalitarian medicine control.  50 years ago the question was which one was right?  Turns out both.  patens regime is existential in USA, and if medicine is for one person, then patents are moot.  That will never be.

We have draconian medical secrecy laws, not for patient benefit, but as usual, to hide Hegemon wrongdoing, such a the Tuskegee experiments.  A critical part of this will be checking the reliability of valid claims, to achieve science and progress, crowd sourced science (and experiments need crowd to become science.)  There is nothing to keep people from volunteering their information, but there will be Hegemon interference with people freely exchanging it or storing it.

Further, to benefit most USA would need to be a welcoming destination for medical tourism.  Under totalitarian fascism, our airports and country is in travel lock down, both ways.  Try leaving USA anonymously.

This is a non-starter if the government is involved, except to deregulate.  On the other hand, some other country that is trending toward freedom, say India, China, Russia, may very well create the milieu in which this will work, and attain the benefits therefrom.

This degeneration of the USA is a self-inflicted... as we applaud violence and welcome choices in our elections such as Bush/Clinton yet again, we just go deeper and deeper.

Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.


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