Re-focusing the ethical discourse on personalized medicine: a qualitative interview study with stakeholders in the German healthcare system.

ABSTRACT:

Background

In recent years, personalized medicine (PM) has become a highly regarded line of development in medicine. Yet, it is still a relatively new field. As a consequence, the discussion of its future developments, in particular of its ethical implications, in most cases can only be anticipative. Such anticipative discussions, however, pose several challenges. Nevertheless, they play a crucial role for shaping PM's further developments. Therefore, it is vital to understand how the ethical discourse on PM is conducted, i.e. on what - empirical and normative - assumptions ethical arguments are based regarding PM's current and future developments.

Methods

To gather this information, we conducted a qualitative interview study with stakeholders in the German health care syste

SUBMITTER: Schleidgen S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3681604 | biostudies-literature | 2013 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature