 |
Approximately 170 million Americans take prescription drugs, and about 1.9 million of those individuals are hospitalized each year due to prescriptions (from overdoses and adverse side effects). Stukanov’s book makes a strong argument for personalizing, or fine-tuning, an individual’s prescription treatment.
Pharmaceutical companies generally only consider four expansive groupings of the population: elderly, children, pregnant women, and “others.” Further, instructions for prescription medications completely leave out significant factors from the equation, such as sex, age, weight, and blood type. Stukanov makes a strong argument, backed up by generous use of anecdotal examples, showing that if these specific factors were taken into consideration, the process could be medically beneficial in customizing specific prescription information. This would result in both greater efficacy of the drug as well as a decrease in unwanted side effects. “Every person should test and optimize medical treatments to suit the real person,” he writes, “not a hypothetical average person.” Modern medicine assumes that almost all people will generally respond the same way to medical treatment—pharmaceutical or otherwise. This is simply not the case, as shown by the promising and rising field of personalized medicine, which focuses specifically on a person’s unique DNA analysis.
The author makes a solid case for individualizing prescription medication amounts, times of day taken, etc. Though some of the presented material might prove a bit inaccessible for the general reader—such as weighty mathematical equations—most of this becomes moot, as the author provides more than enough explanation for his hypotheses in layperson’s terminology in the text itself. Of special note is Stukanov’s specific guided plan for an “ordinary person” to accomplish personalized fine-tuning, based upon experimentation and analysis of results, which is much like the pharmaceutical companies do themselves, simply on an individual level.