NYT: Personalized Psychopharmacology (Murphy)

This week's NYTimes Health section features an article by Dr. Richard Friedman titled "On the Horizon, Personalized Depression Drugs."  He gives an overview of recent advances in pharmacogenomics and highlights the benefits of the field to psychiatry as: 1) producing better therapeutic outcomes for patients, 2) avoiding undesirable or risky side effects, and, as an indirect consequence, 3) "chang(ing) the relationship between doctors and the drug industry and between the industry and the public":

Direct-to-consumer advertising will become nearly irrelevant because the drugs will no longer be interchangeable, but will be prescribed based on an individual’s biological profile. Likewise, doctors will have little reason to meet with drug company representatives because they won’t be able to give doctors the single most important piece of information: which drug for which patient. For that doctors will need a genetic test, not a salesman.

An interesting angle, given the recent press about drug companies influence over physician prescribing habits.  Certainly a new DTC/DTP advertising market would emerge for companies producing gene chips or other technology used in pharmacogenomic assessments.

Dr. Friedman closes his article with an appeal to the reader's "common sense psychology" of dualism, that the mind is fundamentally different from the brain (to borrow from Bloom and Weisberg, Science 18 May 2007, and Bloom's Descartes' Baby).  Friedman closes:   

Soon, your psychiatrist will really get to know you — not just your mind, but your brain, too. Treatment doesn’t get more personal than that.

Perhaps the improving influence of pharmacogenomics on psychiatric treatment of depression and other mental illnesses will further nudge the the public zeitgeist away from dualism towards a unified sense of mental processes, both normal and maladapted, arising from processes in the brain that may be altered by medical intervention.

Comments

[Self Help Zone]

Hello Emily Murphy,

Well its really good to know that psychiatrist can read brain, understand the exact problem and give good treatment.

[Anon Student]

And thus ends the market for "experts" in insanity defenses?