ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the clinical setting to describe the ideal of personalized medicine that most medical oncologists in Singapore hold, which involves using the molecular characteristics of individuals to improve prevention, detection, and treatment of cancer. It identifies some of the social and economic conditions, which are seen as suboptimal by most, if not all, clinicians, under which the racial and ethnic identities of patients shape treatment decisions. The oncologists interviewed were not explicitly critical of researchers using ethnic or racial categories in studying the human genetic or genomic structure; however, they articulated problems in using ethnicity or race as a basis for clinical decision-making. A lung cancer medicine, for example, would benefit a patient of any ethnicity, as it targets the genetic variant, which remains the same across ethnic groups. Drug efficacy involves assessing the effectiveness of a particular drug therapy for an individual patient.
