The Quest for Personalised Health

Last weekend, I went to a fascinating conference entitled The Quest for Personalised Health, organised by the University of Westminster.  The purpose of the conference was to explore the interface between East Asian medicine and modern system sciences.  So, those present included systems biologists, acupuncturists, social analysts, herbalists, doctors, historians and researchers. 

As an acupuncturist, I was intrigued to learn from systems biologists that genes are merely databases and do nothing without interacting with the rest of the human system.  As a result of this insight, some systems biologists are looking for multiple actions and therefore multi-action drugs, which sounded quite like the sort of approach taken by acupuncturists and herbalists towards their patients.  Systems biologists, it turns out, also look at the effect of mental and social states, environment and behaviour, when trying to address health issues.  So they see intervention as a complex process, not as a simple matter of targeting one trigger in a physiological process.

It was also interesting to learn that in Korea, there is interaction between scientists and traditional “sasang” practitioners.  Korean sasang emphasises the role in health of the person’s constitution, as does traditional Chinese medicine, which I practise.  All three (systems biology, Chinese medicine and Korean sasang) look for a patient specific treatment.  Looking for synthesis between Eastern and Western medicine at the conference emphasised the importance of seeing human health and illness in terms of the processes that are happening in a person, whether those processes have a western name such as circulation or an oriental name such as qi.

Exploration of what is involved in medical treatment of any nature inevitably includes research into efficacy, and we were given an enlightening discourse on the placebo effect of the patient’s response to the clinician and the wider consultation, as well as to any specific treatment.  This was particularly interesting in view of the current difficulties in assessing research into acupuncture, where the ‘sham’ needle has been hailed as the gold standard method of comparing ‘real’ acupuncture with ‘sham’ acupuncture, leaving many of us wondering why the whole process of an acupuncture treatment (rapport, relaxation, dietary and lifestyle advice etc.) is excluded from study.

The conference was a refreshing change and stimulating experience – if this blog has stimulated your interest in the connection between systems biology and Chinese medicine, have a look at the book written by one of the speakers: The Music of Life, by Dennis Noble – beyond the genome http://musicoflife.co.uk/dnoble.html.