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Date Submitted: 08/15/2011 04:11 PM
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—...