Introduction
This introductory chapter argues that the advent of personalized medicine, precision medicine, and new consumer-focused services—such as personal genomics—is changing the nature of the traditional doctor–patient relationship. If trust was the ethical value guiding the traditional doctor–patient relationship, now other considerations such as market efficiency are aggregated to the considerations of the relationship between the patient and the health-care provider. Also, if medical law traditionally focused on the regulation of the doctor–patient relationship, nowadays medical law also encompasses the regulation of institutional relationships involving health-care providers of different sorts and at various levels. Some new services also pose challenges for medical lawyers and ethicists, because they are not being offered within the traditional clinical setting and thus sit outside the traditional governance frameworks established in medical settings. The chapter then provides an overview of the general theories on the philosophical foundations of medical law.