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Treatment planning considers the cancer biology and the person living with it.
Key points
- Cancer biology
- Personal context
- Care plan
Understanding the approach
Biology
Tumor features and relevant test results help inform treatment choices.
The whole person
Health history, daily life and preferences add important context.
A shared plan
The care team and patient discuss options, goals and follow-up.
Evidence & context
Personalized, precision and individualized medicine are overlapping terms; terminology varies by setting.
Simply put, individualized medicine is specific to just one person, an individual. This is different from personalized medicine which is applied to a group, say all males between 50 and 70 years old.
The following distinctions between individualized and personalized medicine are drawn from Wikipedia. Simply put, individualized medicine is specific to just one person, an individual. This is different from personalized medicine which is applied to a group, say all males between 50 and 70 years old.
“Individualized medicine tailors treatment to a single patient. The term refers to an individual, truly personalized medicine that strives to treat each patient on the basis of his own individual biology.
Individualized medicine represents a further individualization of personalized medicine. While the latter is aimed at a specific group of patients, individualized medicine deals with the individual circumstances of a single person. Thus, individualized medicine goes one step further and can be considered as an increase in personalized medicine.
Individualized medicine seeks to derive tailored therapies for individuals by taking into account a person's genes (opens in a new tab) as well as the full range of that person's unique nature, including biological, physiological and anatomical information.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individualized_medicine (opens in a new tab)“Personalized medicine, also referred to as precision medicine, is a medical model that separates people into different groups…”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalized_medicine (opens in a new tab)