Medical profiling and online medicine: the ethics of ‘personalised healthcare’ in a consumer age

Abstract

"This report is concerned with a number of new developments in medical profiling and online medicine that are claimed by some to herald a new era of ‘personalised healthcare’. We aim to explore this bold claim, what it might mean, and what the ethical implications of such developments could be. By ‘medical profiling’ we mean new services offering direct-to-consumer body imaging as a health check and personal genetic profiling for individual susceptibility to disease. By ‘online medicine’ we mean developments in digital technology, largely involving the internet, that offer new ways for individuals to obtain and share health advice, diagnosis and medication, and that provide new possibilities for storing, accessing and sharing health records, monitoring individuals’ health status and communicating with health professionals and other patients." (p. xvii)