ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the types of empowerment: individualistic empowerment focusing on widening consumer choice; instrumental empowerment that treats listening to patients as necessary to obtain other goals, such as improving healthcare. It also discusses the democratic empowerment, which treats widening and deepening of participation as having intrinsic value; and emancipatory empowerment with a focus on liberating people from oppressive structures or arrangements. Another challenge connected to contemporary visions and practices of precision medicine is surveillance. This is very much in line with the dominant global discourse, which treats better individual-level control as the most effective strategy to mitigate the power asymmetries that the collection and use of health data is embedded in. Other scholars call for a stronger role of public and collective civil society actors in the health data domain. At the time of the conclusion of the Human Genome Project, personalised medicine was largely understood as matching drug treatments to groups of patients sharing genetic markers in common.
