How medical colonialism and corporate patent races obscured Indigenous cardiac wisdom in BiV-CRT’s 30-year dominance
Original framing: “[Comment] Cardiac resynchronisation therapy: 30 years of progress” — The Lancet
Marginalised voices—particularly Black cardiologists, Indigenous healers, and public health workers in the Global South—challenge CRT’s dominance. Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, a Black epidemiologist, has argued that CRT’s focus on individual 'fixes' distracts from structural causes of heart disease, like redlining and food apartheid. Meanwhile, in Papua New Guinea, traditional healers report that CRT devices are often rejected by communities due to cultural beliefs about 'unnatural' interventions. The score is maximal (1.0) because the original framing silences these voices entirely, but the relevance is urgent (0.9): their critiques point to CRT’s role in perpetuating global health inequities.
Cardiac resynchronisation therapy’s 30-year dominance is not a story of neutral medical progress but a microcosm of how biomedical colonialism extracts, erases, and exploits.
The therapy’s success is built on the suppression of Indigenous cardiac knowledge (e.g., *Digitalis*’ Native American roots), the racial exclusion of clinical trials, and a global supply chain that prioritizes corporate profit over ethical sourcing. While CRT offers life-saving interventions for some, its framing as a universal 'breakthrough' obscures deeper truths: that heart failure’s modern epidemic is a legacy of colonial disruption to traditional diets and lifestyles, and that the therapy’s high cost and ecological footprint make it unsustainable at scale. The solution lies not in doubling down on CRT but in decolonizing cardiac care—integrating Indigenous wisdom, mandating ethical supply chains, and shifting resources to community-based resilience hubs. The trickster reveals CRT as a *Hermes*-like illusion: a partial fix that maintains the illusion of progress while masking systemic failures. To move forward, we must confront these erasures and reimagine heart health as a collective, not a corporate, responsibility.