What is personalized healthcare, and why is it important?
Personalized healthcare is about finding the solution, or intervention that’s unique and appropriate to you and your needs, designed with a focus on you only. However, it’s become a bit of a buzzword that’s been overused by the health industry in recent years.
So, what does it ACTUALLY mean, and why should you care if your treatment is personalized?
What is personalization when it comes to health?
A great example of personalization is when you are looking for a new pair of glasses.
You have two options available:
1 - Go to a supermarket and look at the off-the-shelf options for you there. You can test and try these to see which helps improve your sight and buy those there and then.
Or,
2 - Go to an optician and get a prescription. They measure your eyes, looking for any damage, or deviation from the norm, and the distance measurements around your face and eyes. You may then need to wait a few days for the glasses to be made, but when they do, they are made specifically for your eyes, your sight, and your face.
The result is that supermarket glasses may work to help improve your sight overall - however as they aren’t created specifically for your eyesight they may cause you to over or under-correct your sight in order to adjust your vision to those glasses. The result is that you may be able to see better, but you still have a headache.
Both of these options could be called personalization - however, the second option is an example of true personalization, whereas the first option is population-level personalization - it is a mass allocation of care according to which category of a population you would fit, together with people with similar traits as you (such as eyesight, mental health condition, or health condition). This means the entire population is given the same treatment and dosage, and if there are adjustments done, it is very much dependent on whom you are receiving the care from. It’s not bespoke to you, it’s general to the whole group.
Human bodies are all unique, they respond to medication and interventions in unique ways too - we can’t assume that one size fits all with healthcare. An example is the well-known painkiller ibuprofen
It’s recommended that when we struggle with a headache, we take 400-600mg of ibuprofen as an adult.
However, this same dosage applies to a young female adult with a small body weight, as well as a large adult man with a large muscular weight and build. The reality is that this same dosage will have a totally different impact on these two very different bodies- and yet this is what we stick to unless we are given personalized, different advice by a health professional who looks at our build and needs and calculates the exact dosage.
How can this same principle be applied to mental health?
Cognitive functions can be thought of in a similar way to eyesight - they can deviate from the ‘norm’, with the rest of our brain compensating, or adjusting, in order to function. These deviations can occur due to genetics, or your environment, and it’s absolutely normal to have these - but understanding these specific deviations and how they influence your cognitive function is the key to achieving personalized care.
Currently, in mental health, we have generalized treatments such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and medication - however, these are treating at the POPULATION level concept of personalization. We label the diagnosis and then treat that diagnosis - based on what has worked for that population in general. In other words, the supermarket glasses approach.
The ability to measure these deviations and understand what they mean is very new, especially in mental health. Physical health is much further ahead, due to the technologies and tests that are now available - we can measure an individual's blood to monitor their responses to specific interventions, and fine-tune dosages, medications, and therapies until we discover the optimum fit for their personal requirements and responses.
We need this same measurement ability for the brain, in order to create personalized care for mental health. We have to define exactly what requires measuring in order to understand that individual and how to help them. However, the brain is a very clever organ, and doesn’t like to make this easy!
When we start testing the brain, we probe it, we provide a stimulus to try to measure the response. However, the brain is too smart for its own good, and it quickly learns how to adapt its responses around this probe - often misleading our perceptions of its true cognitive functions.
A great example of this is the apps and games out there that you see promoting ‘improve your short-term memory’, or ‘brain exercises to combat memory loss’.
Your brain learns how to participate in these games, so we see improvement - great! However, this improvement doesn’t actually roll out into reality, as it’s trapped in the confines of that game or app. The improvement was actually an example of ‘meta-learning’ - this process of the brain adapting to a probe and falsifying its responses. The brain learns how to learn.
We will talk more about meta-learning in a future article very soon, but here is some information about what it means from Science Direct.
Does personalization truly make healthcare more effective?
Personalized care will hugely improve the effectiveness and efficiency of both mental and physical healthcare. Precision treatment or psychiatry means that you are only correcting the deviations that need correcting - we don’t want to be over or under-correcting things that aren’t causing any problems in the first place, as this forces the body to adjust - causing problems of its own.
If you have a leg amputated, in order to walk again, you may look for an artificial leg. You could be given a standard leg, which isn’t created specifically for you, your height, and gait - the result is that you can now walk again, however, the slight measurement differences will throw you off balance. This can have an impact on your back, or your other leg - it may cause pain or discomfort.
This same principle can be applied to cognitive functions again. If you over or under-correct, then other cognitive functions will start to be impacted - you may see overall a positive change from where you started, but it won’t be your optimum mental state - which is where we want you to be.
True personalization puts everyone on equal footing. It matters.
How is Alena leading the way with personalized mental health support?
Using a new technique with computational neuroscience, we are creating a way of measuring your cognitive functions and analyzing social anxiety at an individual level.
This enables us to give you an understanding of your thought patterns, and any deviations from ‘the norm’ that you may experience. These deviations are not a bad thing - this is really important to understand. We all think differently, work differently, and react differently - but understanding HOW is vital when we are wanting to help ourselves with our mental health.
We give you an overview of your social anxiety profile, and then offer you a personalized treatment plan based on these results.
We have just launched our social anxiety app, however, we believe that the future of mental health is moving away from labels such as ‘social anxiety’ and ‘depression’. It’s about understanding yourself, and how to choose relevant and effective treatments for your specific requirements.
Want to assess your cognitive processes?
Download the Alena app and find out what drives your social anxiety.