Personalized Dosage for Better Health Outcomes

Understanding the Interrelationship of Pharmaceuticals & Gut Microbiota Using Biocomputing

Maggie Chua
10 min readJul 30, 2021
Photo by The-Lore.com on Unsplash

Too much of one thing is never a good thing, and the adage continues to hold true when we look at modern medicine.

As the father of toxicology, Paracelsus says:

“All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”

This is especially so when discussing the use of pharmeceutical drugs to treat patients with unique backgrounds and medical histories. Overtreatment or undertreatment of diseases can both harm the patient and strain the medical system.

In fact, 25% of emergency hospitalizations in the US were attributed to glucose-lowering medications to treat diabetes. Because of this, many patients had to be treated for hypoglycemia, where blood sugar levels are too low.

Both overtreatment/undertreatment pose a public health risk, causing excessive patient harm where the side effects of a treatment can lead to the development of adverse reactions or conditions that require further medical attention. As a result, the shift to personalized medicine, specifically personalized dosage of…

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Maggie Chua

A 17-year-old who knows less about life than she thought she thought. I write about anything that captures my interest.