Biomarking Life

Abstract

Boenink and Molen help us reflect on how biomarkers come to change our conceptions of disease and patient care in the future. However, whether biomarkers make disease more physiological and anticipatory and medicine more person centred may need more research. Clearly, biomarkers can decouple medicine and healthcare from what matters to people (such as pain, dysfunction, and suffering), reducing the moral relevance of medicine. Hence, putting biomarkers at the center of medicine may not mean that we set persons at the center of medicine, as they claim. On the contrary, a biomarkerization of medicine may make us all diseased, as there are no healthy persons left, only persons that have not been sufficiently biomarkerized. Biomarkers may do more than detecting or anticipating disease. They may come to define “the good life” and how we feel and fare.