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Anytime we are faced with a radically different worldview (such as the Hmong's), we are faced with the disturbing question: How far can our own culture—or own version of reality—be trusted? Fadiman also portrayed the doctors as motivated overall by good intentions. One perspective is that of her family, who believed that epilepsy had a spiritual rather than a medical explanation, and who had both practical difficulty (as illiterate, non-English speaking immigrants to the U. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman. )
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Chapter 11 The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Essay
Knowing she had worked with the Hmong, I started to lament the insensitivity of Western medicine. Most families took about a month to reach Thailand, although some lived in the jungles for two years or more. Set f = tFile(file). Chapter 11 the spirit catches you and you fall down litcharts. Good doctors may treat the disease, but the best doctors treat the individual. When Lia Lee Entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication. Lia was, in fact, given an inordinate amount of medication and was also subjected to a large number of diagnostic tests. This is an impressive work! These days we are seeing alternate-reality belief systems sprouting all over the place on social media, so that there is now as much of a gulf between a Stop the Steal conspiracy theorist Trumpster and a normal person as there was between the Hmong and their Californian doctors.
He attributed her condition to this procedure, which many Hmong believe to hold the potential of crippling a patient for both this life and future lives. 1997 Winner, National Book Critics Circle Award - Nonfiction. In Merced, CA, which has a large Hmong community, Lia Lee was born, the 13th child in a family coping with their plunge into a modern and mechanized way of life. Can't find what you're looking for? Believing that the family's failure to comply with his instructions constituted child abuse, Lia's doctor had her placed in foster care. They suffered massive casualties and devastating destruction of their villages; when the People's Democratic Republic took over the Laotian monarchy in 1975 and attempted to exterminate the Hmong, they were once again forced to flee their homes. For many years, she was a writer and columnist for Life, and later an Editor-at-Large at Civilization. Her parents believed this was caused when her older sister had slammed the front door of their apartment, drawing the attention of a spirit who had caught Lia's soul. Get help and learn more about the design. Stream Chapter 11 - The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down from melloky | Listen online for free on. A brilliant study in cross-cultural medicine. This book was neither. Pathet Lao soldiers infiltrated most villages and spied on families day and night. They were motivated not only by fear of the communists but also by famine. Not only do their perceptions indicate important information got lost in translation, they also reflect many patients' views of doctors as more powerful than they really are.
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The Hmong only eat meat about once a month, when an animal is sacrificed. Can you understand their motivation? The New York Times Book Review. The Vietnamese would kill them for minor offences such as stealing food, and they took away the majority of what they harvested. Chapter 11 the spirit catches you and you fall down free pdf. I often say that one of the things I most love about Goodreads is that I "discover" through friends' reviews books that I might otherwise have gone my entire life not knowing about. I wonder if she'd have the same tolerance for a white anti-vaxxer who doesn't have their kid inoculated for a deadly disease, or a Jehovah's Witness who refuses consent for a child's blood transfusion.
Families had to leave behind pretty much everything they owned. The need to classify and categorize stems from a desire to control. The Hmong and their language and their culture were yet virtually unknown and entirely misunderstood in America at this time while Mia and her family knew only their own culture and language. When she stopped, she was breathing but still unconscious. In fact, they got worse. Chapter 11 the spirit catches you and you fall down audiobook. While "failing to work within the traditional Hmong hierarchy... [they] not only insulted the entire family but also yielded confused results, since the crucial questions had not been directed toward those who had the power to make decisions.
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It's clear that the Hmong people feel (and quite rightfully, I'd say) that the states owe them something for their help in the war and yet, looking at the way they were treated, it's clear that this mindset is not shared by the states. There were and are no easy answers, but there always are lessons to be learned, and a lot can be learned from this book. Don't read any further unless you don't mind knowing the basic story told in this book (there are no spoilers, since this is not a book with a surprise ending, but if you want to keep a completely open mind, stop now)... When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. The case frustrated and confounded Lia's doctors, husband and wife Neil Ernst and Peggy Philip, who possessed a "combination of idealism and workaholism that had simultaneously contributed to their successes and set them apart from most of their peers. " A visiting nurse in the book angered me by telling the Lees they should raise rabbits to eat instead of buying rats at the pet store. Transcultural medical care. CII, October 19, 1997, p. 28.
To this day we don't know why). The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her parents preferred animal sacrifices. Some more Hmong beliefs about illness: Falling ill can be caused by various things, like eating the wrong food, or failing to ejaculate completely during sexual intercourse, or neglecting to make the correct offerings to ancestors or touching a newborn mouse or urinating on a rock that looks like a tiger. How does the greatest of all Hmong folktales, the story of how Shee Yee fought with nine evil dab brothers (p. 170), reflect the life and culture of the Hmong? On this question, Fadiman is admittedly biased. I find that non-fiction books often err on the side of being either informative but too dry, or engaging but also too sensationalist/one-sided. —Rebecca Cress-Ingebo, Fordham Health Sciences Library, Wright State University, Dayton, OH. But what if the doctors hadn't prescribed a medication that would compromise Lia's immune system?
Chapter 11 The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Audiobook
Later, she points out what the doctors didn't pay attention to - her high temperature, diarrhea, and a very low platelet count - which later turned out to be signs of septic shock. I read this book for a class i am taking called "human behavior and the social environment. " Lia Lee's parents immigrated to this country in the early 1980s from Laos. Fadiman spent hundreds of hours interviewing doctors, social workers, members of the Hmong community--anyone who was somehow involved in Lia Lee's medical nightmare. Many who had resisted coming to the US now decided it was the better of the two options, yet nearly 2, 000 Hmong were denied refugee status. The story is of the treatment of the epileptic child of a Hmong immigrant family in the American health system. Despite this, Lia deteriorated, improving only when she was put on a new, simpler drug regime. Though you want to put blame somewhere, on someone, for the tragedy of errors that transpired, there is ultimately no villain. A few months after returning home, Lia was hospitalized with a massive seizure that effectively destroyed her brain. No one acted with malice, everyone wanted what was best for Lia, but there was no way for the two opposing sides – Lia's parents and community vs the doctors and social workers – could come to agreement. I've dealt with a chronic medical condition for the last couple years that has sent me on a semi-desperate search for a specialist who would listen to me. They also took her off anticonvulsives since, without electrical activity in her brain, she couldn't seize anymore.
Hmong American children -- Medical care -- California. I won't ever forget Lia's story, and I hope everyone in their own time will discover it too. Unfortunately, the time it took for the ambulance to bring Lia to the hospital may have cost her life. Because empirical Cartesian science-based clinically-trialled peer-reviewed Western medicine IS thought to be true, not just one of several possible truths. It is hypocritical of Westerners to vilify the Hmong and other cultures for eating dogs when they eat pigs, which are even more intelligent than dogs. November 30, 1997, XIV, p. 3. Reading this book, that idea was challenged.