Cardiac Troponins and the Future of Precision Medicine.

There is an increasing emphasis across the fields of medicine on managing individual patients in ways that are tailored to the patient’s unique characteristics—an approach termed personalized or individualized medicine. Although these terms are relatively new, the concept of personalized medicine has a long history, with Sir William Osler (1849– 1919) famously quoted as saying that “the good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.” Because physicians have practiced personalized medicine in this classic sense since long before the introduction of modern advanced testing, the term precision medicine has been proposed to better reflect the incorporation of new scientific and technological advances in the practice of personalized medicine, including the use of genetic information and biomarkers.