In terms of the strategy of using the data of medical science, there are 3 main stages in the history of the development of Western medicine. The first, stage of empirical medicine, was mainly based on the accumulated individual medical experience, generally accepted opinions and attached great importance to clinical thinking and medical intuition. The scientific base was built on the results of small retrospective clinical studies, the experience of individual doctors and clinics, traditions, case reports and expert consensus. Medical schools were located on the basis of medical universities in the most developed countries and were characterized by their vision, understanding and approaches. Scientific and practical cooperation was limited. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the examples of the most advanced are the German and Austrian medical schools.

The rapid changes that took place in science and technology at the end of the twentieth century were closely related to medical science. Often contradictory medical data, massive introduction of new drugs and technologies into the medical market, high dynamics of changes in approaches and concepts did not correspond to the existing empirical model. The empirical stage is being replaced by evidence-based medicine (see the corresponding section of the site).

At the beginning of the XXI century, new scientific revolutions took place in medicine. The genetic revolution objectifies the growing understanding of gene pathology in the development of diseases and new approaches to treatment based on this. The computing revolution, as a result of the exponential growth of computing power, is facilitating the generation and storage of medical data, electronic records and images. These achievements determined the future stage of Western medicine, the stage of personalized medicine based on the analysis of the individual genetic code and personal medical information of patients.

How is the concept of evidence-based, different from the personalized medicine of tomorrow? The main difference is in the vision of a real patient. Evidence-based medicine considers a patient as a representative of a group of people united by one symptom (disease). This is how the design of the main studies is built, uniting patients into one group and analyzing the properties of the group as a whole on the model of one averaged – abstract object. Thus, one impersonal patient reflects the properties of the whole group, united according to the chosen characteristic. The logic of evidence-based medicine is based on contextual thinking (the main question is what a particular patient has in common with a group of patients with similar symptoms) and a treatment strategy is selected accordingly. The individual characteristics of the patient are underestimated, the profile of the doctor, the surrounding conditions, etc., are not taken into account.

The concept of personalized medicine focuses on the characteristics of each patient. The logic of personalized medicine is based on analytical and differential thinking (the main question is what distinguishes this patient from a group of other patients with the same clinical diagnosis).

Thus, the medical practice of evidence-based medicine is based on treatment standards in accordance with the accepted principles (Guidelines), and the medical strategy of personalized medicine is based on the individual characteristics of the patient (genetics, analysis of individual indicators and reactions).

The scientific focus of evidence-based medicine is built on identifying statistically proven associations between phenomena and effects, and personalized is focused on determining the mechanisms of connections.

The success of an evidence-based medicine strategy is globally assessed based on the results at the level of the population, society (for example, due to the use of any approach, mortality in the country decreased by 1%), and the success of personalized medicine is assessed individually, at the level of a specific patient.

Personalized medicine does not reject the achievements of evidence-based medicine, but modernizes and enriches it. The very development of evidence-based medicine has led to its intermediate stage “Scoring medicine” or an attempt to differentiate approaches based on guidelines through the use of medical calculators.