Early Treatment Diseases

Early treatment will significantly change the way medicine is practiced and require medical education to change. The following identifies some ways that medical practice will change: • Prediction, loosely “diagnosis” and treatment of a disease will occur for a patient before there are any obvious symptoms of the disease. • The patient may not wish to have knowledge that he/she will likely get the disease and thus may not agree to prediction or treatment. • Prediction of the disease may only be possible during a given time frame before the disease occurs. • Treatment may also only be possible during a given time frame. Certainly, treatment should occur before, possibly long before, there are obvious symptoms. • Prediction or treatment of the disease has the potential of causing harm, so a false positive prediction could cause harm to the patient without any benefit. • Since the process of prediction of a disease could cause harm, then only selected patients (e.g., with a particular genetic makeup) may be candidates for early treatment of a given disease. • Insurance companies may be reluctant to pay for early treatments as the disease has not yet obviously occurred.