No I am not Dr. Phil and this blog posting is not about rebuilding that precious relationship called family marriage. Of course there is plenty of advice and blogs out there on this subject.
I am talking about the marriage between a physician or medical practice and the patient. I am firmly committed to Pharmacogenetic testing (PGx) and want to explain why you should be too and how you can prove it starting today. First what it is and a little background.
This testing provides information about a patient’s likelihood to have an adverse response and/or a therapeutic response to a medication, enabling the potential for a tailored and personalized approach to medication therapy. In other words using a simple mouth swab and the resulting testing from your DNA, your physician, including specialists can know in advance know what your body may respond favorably to and what it may not. What a remarkable scientific safeguard!
Using a simplified lab report, generated after a quick mouth swab in the office, my physician can better help me to manage pain, infection and any other malady based upon his/her foreknowledge of how my body will respond to something. In another blog I talk about cancer prevention screening but this one was intended to focus on this one area of person-centered medical care.
A physician’s office surely can opt not to use this tool to heighten the quality and person-centeredness of their patient care. However, at some point a patient, with knowledge of this tool’s availability would legitimately ask why not utilize something of such value to the patient? Considering that a medical practice in most instances can bill for an office visit, this means its not a free usage of the medical practice’s time or personnel.
Add to that these realities:
- A patient can perhaps avoid being among the horrible statistics of those becoming sicker or even dying from adverse medication reactions;
- A patient can avoid taking a medication your doctor could have known in advance your body would not favorably respondto
Oh how the advantages of this testing keep piling up. This should be equally meaningful if you have responsibility over the management of the care of others including group home owners and case managers.
Yes I can earn from this, after all my company is the party that cements the relationships between the physician and the lab and educates practice personnel from billers to medical assistants on the processes. None of this removes either the value or validity of what this testing is accomplishing now and will continue to accomplish.
If you are a physician contact me via email to bruce@directcaretraining.com or phone to 248.755.0749. Patients can ask my office to reach out to your doctor for you. Regardless of the medical practice type – be it internal medicine, urology, psychiatry, neurology, cardiology or other specialty – today you can take a step that creates more confidence in what truly is an important human marriage.
Sign-in and share your thoughts.
_________________________________________
Photos used are for communicative affect only and may belong to their respective licensees. They must never be received as an indication of the support or endorsement of or by or affiliation with any individual or organization. Photos are also not meant to disparage any race, gender, faith, ethnicity or sexual orientation. The photos used are for the sole purpose of complementing the subject matter written.