The Need for Formally Defining “Modern Medicine” by Means of Experimental Design

There is general agreement that the manner medicine is currently practiced is not adequate for addressing all health relevant issues in a way that would be most beneficial for all patients and that we need a new modern medicine. Even candidates for such a modern medicine have been recently nominated in the form of (I) personalizedmedicine, (II) precisionmedicine, (III) P4medicine, (IV) P5 medicine, and (V) stratified medicine, which we will review briefly. The purpose of our opinion paper is to emphasize the urgent need for a formal definition in terms of the experimental design of modern medicine in order to deal efficiently with the opportunities provided by high-throughput genomic data and that all the current candidate programs mentioned above are lacking such a formalization. In order to reveal these shortcomings and to see the need for revised formulations, we provide in the following a brief account on the proposed approaches (I–V). According to the Committee on a Framework for Development a New Taxonomy of Disease, National Research Council (2011):