Person-centered medicine and good clinical practice: disease has to be cured, but the patient has to be healed.

ABSTRACT

Contemporary medicine has been in the process of a paradigm shift. Instead of relatively broad pathological entities, population-based risk assesments, and non-specific "one-size-fits-all" therapies, a new paradigm of predictive, individualized and personalized care and targeted therapy is rolling on the horizon. Person-centered medicine is a term with different meanings which competes in some way to other terms like medicine of the person, patient-centered medicine, personalized and individualzed medicine, integrative and holistic medicine. Clear definition of theoretical framework and clinical practice of person-centered medicine is urgent to prevent dangereous increasing confusion.