title: Personalized medicine: evidence of normativity in its quantitative definition of health.
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.
authors.affiliation: General Practice Research Unit, Department of Public Health and General Practice, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. vogt.henrik@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Henrik
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Vogt
authors.affiliation: Section for Health, Technology, and Society, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Gjøvik, Norway.|Centre for Medical Ethics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
authors.forename: Bjørn
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Hofmann
authors.affiliation: General Practice Research Unit, Department of Public Health and General Practice, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
authors.forename: Linn
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Getz
mesh_terms: D005544:Forecasting; D006801:Humans; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D057285:Precision Medicine
keywords: Health concepts; Medicalization; Naturalism; Normativism; Personalized medicine; Systems medicine