Can anthropology improve our care of inherited cardiac arrhythmias? A modest proposal

Calls for greater attention to sociocultural aspects increas- ingly demand that a more individualized, context-conscious approach become part of “ personalized medicine. ” Today, cultural factors are considered crucial to issues ranging from acceptance of diagnosis to choice of treatment, and com- pliance with pharmacologic therapy, and cultural compe- tency has become a fashionable term for clinicians and policy makers. However, as argued by Kleinman and Benson, 1 no one has yet been able to de fi ne the term precisely enough to operationalize it in clinical training and best practice standards. The present analysis makes a case for increased involvement of sociocultural anthropology in a personalized and culturally aware practice of clinical medicine, focusing on inherited cardiac arrhythmias as a particularly suitable paradigm