“My Biomarkers Are Fine, Thank You”: On the Biomarkerization of Modern Medicine

Biomarkers are becoming crucial in ever more medical tasks and are proposed to change medicine in profound ways. By biomarking ever more attributes of human life, they tend to blur the distinction between health and disease and come to characterize life as such. Not only do biomarkers strongly influence the professional conception of disease by pervading ever more diagnoses, but they also impact patients’ experience of illness. To manage how biomarkers influence patients, professionals, and societies, we urgently need to move from identifying potentially relevant biomarkers to determine their meaning and value to individuals, professionals, and public health.