Wake up! It is 2009.

Just because study of gene expression is a complex and evolving field, does not mean that pharmacogenomics has no value. This is why many in the clinical community are still working with paper-based medical records.

As an aside, when my wife was wife was diagnosed with ductal carcinoma 2 years ago, Johns Hopkins had a password-protected web service that provided probabilities of different cancer therapies (including medications) based on various personal and disease attributes.

I agree with “John”, but of course, I did a postdoc in Molecular Biology at the Scripps Research Institute…

No diagnosis value, no prognosis value, no personalized medicine value.

At this moment, our knowledge about genomic link with diseases is so poor that your genome cannot be interpreted at all. It is more harmful than harmless (inaccurate information about prognosis is very dangerous as any doctor knows).

I am a family physician with special interest in medical decision making with years of experience in bioinformatics applied to pharmacogenomics. All these services of genetic testing are just a hype, trust me. The problem is that are a potential harmful hype for the health of the patients.

I recently wrote a post about this in my blog. It is in spanish but you could use a kind of translator in any case:

http://gofiococido.blogspot.com/2008/12/23andme-y-la-nueva-burbuja.html

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=es&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fgofiococido.blogspot.com%2F2008%2F12%2F23andme-y-la-nueva-burbuja.html&sl=es&tl=en&history_state0=&swap=1