Salutogenomics: embracing the full spectrum of human health

Modern biomedical genomics has principally centered on disease, leveraging genomic insights to identify disease-associated genotypes. While valuable, this approach is overly reliant on a positivist, disease-centric perspective that often goes hand-in-hand with patterns like deficit framing, racialized medical stereotyping, and genetic determinism. These practices and their underlying beliefs are detrimental for patients, who experience worse health outcomes as a result, and for participant communities, who endure associated stigmas. This commentary seeks to examine the consequences of this narrow lens and to describe the benefits of an alternative approach: salutogenomics, which highlights the full spectrum of human health. Additionally, we explore how adopting diverse knowledge production paradigms could refashion Western genomic methodologies.