Personalized Medicine
To schedule a video consultation with Dr. Payan at CMN Hospital please contact us.
At CMN, we recognize the power of the individual and take care to ensure that each person is included and given a leadership role in their treatment process: it is your body, and your opinions matter and deserve to be heard and understood. We firmly disagree that doctors should tell patients what to do point-blank; rather we feel that the conversation between patients and doctors is open-ended and crucial to ensuring optimal results. This is a stark difference from most traditional treatments: oftentimes, chemotherapy and radiation is used as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ response to cancer – regardless of its type (there are more than 100!).
Personalized medicine is still in the developmental phases, but has promises to greatly impact how cancer is detected, understood, and treated.
Why is personalized medicine important?
The National Cancer Institute describes personalized medicine as:
“a form of medicine that uses information about a person’s genes, proteins, and environment to prevent, diagnose, and treat disease. In cancer, personalized medicine uses specific information about a person’s tumor to help diagnose, plan treatment, find out how well treatment is working, or make a prognosis. Examples of personalized medicine include using targeted therapies to treat specific types of cancer cells, such as HER2-positive breast cancer cells, or using tumor marker testing to help diagnose cancer. Also called precision medicine”[1]
Personalized is a crucial development in the cancer treatment field because it finally recognizes that no two people are exactly alike and, as such, no two treatment plans should be identical, regardless of whether they both have the same disease. Although “Research suggests that humans have somewhere between 99 and 99.9 percent in common with each other… the remaining 1 percent can make a big difference when it comes to health, whether it is resistance or susceptibility to disease or treatment.”[2] All people are unique, and so are their responses to different treatments; this should be taken into consideration when prescribing therapies.
How personalized medicine works
Personalized medicine reveals the flaws and pitfalls of conventional medicine, specifically in regards to treating cancer.
“As significant advances in research progressed over the course of the last 30 years, the medical community created standards of care and treatment when it came to diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer. However, treating cancer cannot be classified with a standard approach.”[3] Each person is unique; they respond to therapies differently, and their responses should be factored into the next phases of their treatment plan. For example, if a patient found that their energy increased and their immune system strengthened after a hyperbaric oxygen therapy, wouldn’t their doctor make attempts to incorporate that on a more frequent basis for the duration of their treatment? Common sense would say yes, but conventional medicine is often strictly regimented, and such personalized adjustments would go against the overall structure of the plan. Thus, these individual responses are not recognized for their healing abilities in current traditional medicine. They are, however, seen as valid and fast action is taken to include such responses in alternative medicine.
In specific regards to cancer treatment:
“for the last 20 years, cancer cells have outsmarted us by protecting themselves, building a wall, not allowing the immune system to identify and kill them. Current treatments are not aimed at stopping cells from spreading and have almost no selective capacity to distinguish between cancer cells and healthy cells. We’ve basically poisoned the body to kill cancer using chemotherapy and even radiation.”
Personalized medicine has the capability to address this pitfall head-on, and then solve it. “Innovations in genomic testing are leading this emerging era of cancer therapy — analyzing a group of genes and their activity, which can influence how a cancerous tumor is likely to grow and respond to treatment. This type of diagnostic testing analyzes and detects very specific abnormalities in the tumor cells in a patient’s individual cancer.”
Looking Forward
Personalized medicine is still in the process of being incorporated into treatments. It has the potential to dramatically impact how illnesses are detected and treated, especially the time at which they are detected because personalized medicine goes directly into a person’s genes. Their genetic information “can help scientists to predict what diseases people are likely to get, and how their bodies are likely to react.”2It will eventually be capable of recognizing and treating illnesses such as depression and cancer. For a better understanding of how personalized medicine will impact cancer treatment:
Jen Trowbridge, researching how genomics affects cancer at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, foresees that instead of telling a person that they have brain cancer or lung cancer, doctors will be saying, “you have cancer that’s caused by this mutation, and we have a drug that targets that mutation.
Personalized medicine has the power to completely transform how cancer is recognized and treated. Simply put, “Conventional medicine continues to treat the symptoms, but genetic scientists are now working to get right to the roots of diseases, the ‘birth of a cancer,’ starting from cell one.”
Contact Us
CMN Hospital provides alternative cancer treatment and is looking forward to helping you fight your cancer battle. We focus on healing the individual physically, mentally, and emotionally, and make sure that the patient has a voice that is heard throughout the treatment process. At CMN, we want to stay up to date on the latest research and are constantly making moves to ensure that our treatment plans not only reflect this whenever possible. We are ready to communicate with you! To contact us, email us at info@cmnact.com or click here to contact us at your convenience.