Fadima Case

The Anne Fadiman’s story, an alternative conclusion.

NU304-Health/Wellness Assessment and Strategies

Abstract

Patients differ in many ways; some of these differences are due to patient illness, personality,

Socioeconomic class, or education, but the most profound differences may be cultural.

In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down., Anne Fadiman (1997) tells the story of a

Hmong family's encounter with the American health care system and highlights many of the

flaws of what some describe as the best health care system in the world. Nao Kao and Foua Lee

and their children came to the United States as refugees, and they had no other option, they could

not return to their home in Laos. The deported Hmongs say they fled routine attacks by the Lao

military and that they would face torture if they returned home. Thin Lei Win (2010).

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recruited Hmongs to fight

along U.S. forces.

Lia Lee is their three-month-old baby girl diagnosed as an epileptic Neil Ernst and Peggy

Philip, are Lia's pediatricians and after their recommendation Lia is then taken away from her

parents by Child Protective Services and placed in foster care, on assumptions of child-neglect

because refusal by the parents to medicate the baby. This story becomes a tragic case of cultural

miscommunication.

Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her

illness and its treatment could be more different. The Hmong see illness and healing as spiritual

matters linked to virtually everything in the universe, while the standard Western conventional or

mainstream healthcare system treats disease, including epilepsy, using surgery and prescription

medications or drugs. Lia's doctors described her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral

neurons; her parents called her illness, qaug dab peg--the spirit catches you and you fall down—...