[Personalized medicine: an elusive concept, diversified practices]

This article proposes a brief inquiry into the field of scientific and medical practices currently referred to as "personalized medicine". Our inquiry identifies four recurring themes in the literature: health care that is tailored to the individual patient, that is enabled by emerging technologies, in which genetics and genomics occupy a prominent place, and which requires the collection of a massive amount of data. Personalized medicine, thus characterized, turns out to be less interested in the uniqueness of each patient's case than in the differences among patients within the same category. The aim of personalized medicine, thus described, is to obtain, with the help of cutting edge technology, more objective biological data on patients, in an attempt to improve the tools it has at its disposal to establish diagnoses, make therapeutic decisions, and provide more effective preventive measures.