There is probably little dispute that evidence-based medicine (EBM) is the reigning paradigm of medical practice in Western biomedicine today. Fairly recently, however, precision medicine (PM) has been announced as a new framework for delivering tailor-made medical solutions, addressing the specific circumstances of a disease rather than applying standardized practices. At the same time, IT companies like Google and Apple diverted into the health sector for harvesting personalized data as the new gold of the information age.
This talk will take a historical perspective for characterizing these initiatives as fundamentally different approaches to medical practice. Such a sketch of opposing ideal types in the Weberian sense certainly over-emphasizes nuances in the spectrum of current medical research, but shall be used here for situating medical practice vis-à-vis the needs and agency of patients and consumers.
Prof. Dr. med. Cornelius Borck is Director of the Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies at the University of Lübeck.