ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the definition and perspectives of precision medicine versus personalized medicine relevant to research and clinical practice. Similarly, personalized medicine usually refers to a medical approach that proposes the customization of healthcare—with medical decisions, practices, and/or products being tailored to the individual patient. Thus, personalized medicine is often synonymous with precision medicine. A biomarker can be used to assess the therapeutic response to chemotherapy in cancer patients. To apply to herbal medicines, the relationship in these biomarkers associated with herbal medicine needs to be established, then the biomarkers can be utilized as a useful monitoring tool for herbal medicine therapy. While precision or personalized medicine involves the use of unique characteristics of a patient’s disease status, this basic principle appears to share the same concept as the herbal medicine practice or traditional Chinese medicine practice in China.
