If you read anything in the press that relates to healthcare and medicine, you’ll have seen the term ‘personalised medicine’ being bandied around more and more and more.
This is the direction of travel in biomedical technology where we’re now able to target healthcare specifically to the individual based around some extraordinary science, no least related to gene therapies and gene diagnostics.
Isolating the diseases that you’re more likely to get might well influence preventative treatments that you undertake or lifestyle changes that you’re happy to make due to the motivation and knowing that you’re at a high risk and susceptibility to specific diseases.
The development in these areas is yet another reason why dentistry must (as soon as humanly possible) begin to ally itself more closely to medicine and allow itself to be considered a branch of medicine.
Many people are beginning to believe that ‘saliva is the new blood’ and we are closer to saliva than anyone.
Using biosensors and salivary analysis people will be able to guide their personalised healthcare towards healthier, fitter and longer lives (that’s the theory in any event).
There is a wonderful work of fiction called ‘Suicide Club’ where this is discussed and demonstrated as to how it might work but it’s no longer fiction. It’s moving towards fact.
If you see yourself in dentistry 30 years from now (and I do) then you better be looking at robots and you better be looking at personalised medicine.
Blog Post Number - 3142