Thank you, that's an excellent question. Where do I begin?
At the root of it, I think that's the motivation behind this, because we see this genetic testing as key to the personalized medicine or precision medicine that is recognized by health care professionals as the future of medical care.
Let's put it this way, when you go to your doctor and you are diagnosed with a condition or an illness, then the doctor will prescribe a medication that is for the average person. That happens to be the average male with that condition, because that's the way they test it, whereas if the medical professional were to have access to your precise genetic information, then the doctor prescribing could know which medications are most likely to succeed and just as importantly which medications are almost sure to fail.
Here's a startling statistic that I heard a couple of weeks ago in Vancouver. I am told that there are between 10,000 and 20,000 Canadians who die every year because of adverse drug reactions. That's an astounding figure. What happens is that many people are prescribed drugs based upon the general information, and they react adversely.
There's a syndrome called the long QT syndrome. It's a mutation that appears in the general population, in one in 2,500.
