ABSTRACT
The bioethical discourse about the projected ‘shifts’ that individualised medicine (IM) is going to bring to all levels of the health-care system is based on the hypothesis that IM is capable of significantly contributing to the field of medicine, health economics and public health despite the current infancy of its state. However, making bioethical reflections about IM means reflecting on a rapidly changing area because, in spite of definitional efforts (Langanke et al., 2012; Chapter 1, this volume) and concise statements such as -omics, 2 knowledge plus prevention equals ‘IM’, and there is still no common idea of what is involved in IM and of what IM could bring to medicine. Moreover, much of what is being researched and developed under the heading of IM could have been researched and developed under any other heading as well. The main reason for this is probably that individual conceptual moments have always been traditional concepts and goals of any progress in medicine (Gadebusch Bondio and Michl, 2010).
