Médecine personnalisée versus médecine de la personne : une fausse alternative

Abstract

Personalized medicine has recently become the new horizon of healthcare policies worldwide, but it has
also given rise to misunderstandings and conflicting debates due to the lack of clear definitions and appropriate framing. Personalized medicine is mainly defined as the tailoring of diagnosis and therapies to the genetic profile of each patient, both enhanced by considerable improvements of technologies for acquiring and processing large amounts of data. Is personalized medicine the right term however, considering that it focuses on signaling pathways at the molecular level, where undoubtely persons as such cannot be found?
The rival expression «person-centered medicine» has been coined to avoid any ambiguity: on the one hand, molecular biomedicine improved by high-throughtput molecular technologies is more legitimately labelled «individualized» or «precision» medicine, while on the other hand «person-centered medicine» is considered the only authentic personalized medicine insofar as it focuses on the patient as a whole.
Far from overcoming the misunderstandings and conflicting views at stake in current debates on future
medicine however, this divide between personalized and person-centered medicine gives rise to new difficulties and proves to be misleading. Conceptual confusions remain underinvestigated and undermine current attempts to clarify core issues of biomedical research and biomedicine today. This paper intends to
highlight these confusions.