ArticleTheoretical medicine and bioethics2016
Personalized medicine: evidence of normativity in its quantitative definition of health.
Article in Theoretical medicine and bioethics, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Conceptual scaffolding for the philosophy of medicine.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2025Article
- Philosophy of medicine in 2021.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2021Article
- Aging biomarkers and the measurement of health and risk.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2021Article
- The Burnout Phenomenon: A Résumé After More Than 15,000 Scientific Publications.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Article
- Predictive, Personalized, Preventive and Participatory (4P) Medicine Applied to Telemedicine and eHealth in the Literature.Journal of medical systems · 2019Review
- Evidence for personalised medicine: mechanisms, correlation, and new kinds of black box.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2019Article
- Towards precision medicine; a new biomedical cosmology.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Systems medicine, which is based on computational modelling of biological systems, is emerging as an increasingly prominent part of the personalized medicine movement. It is often promoted as 'P4 medicine' (predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory). In this article, we test promises made by some of its proponents that systems medicine will be able to develop a scientific, quantitative metric for wellness that will eliminate the purported vagueness, ambiguity, and incompleteness-that is, normativity-of previous health definitions. We do so by examining the most concrete and relevant evidence for such a metric available: a patent that describes a systems medicine method for assessing health and disease. We find that although systems medicine is promoted as heralding an era of transformative scientific objectivity, its definition of health seems at present still normatively based. As such, we argue that it will be open to influence from various stakeholders and that its purported objectivity may conceal important scientific, philosophical, and political issues. We also argue that this is an example of a general trend within biomedicine to create overly hopeful visions and expectations for the future.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.