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Books : The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures |
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.461
EAN: 9780374267810
ISBN: 0374267812
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 339
Publication Date: September 30, 1997
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sales Rank: 184452
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
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. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run 'Quiet War' in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia's pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine. When Lia Lee Entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history 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 hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness aand healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually everything in the universe, while medical community marks a division between body and soul, and concerns itself almost exclusively with the former. Lia's doctors ascribed 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--and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her parents preferred animal sacrifices.
Amazon.com Review:
Lia Lee was born in 1981 to a family of recent Hmong immigrants, and soon developed symptoms of epilepsy. By 1988 she was living at home but was brain dead after a tragic cycle of misunderstanding, overmedication, and culture clash: 'What the doctors viewed as clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as frosty arrogance.' The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, written with the deepest of human feeling. Sherwin Nuland said of the account, 'There are no villains in Fadiman's tale, just as there are no heroes. People are presented as she saw them, in their humility and their frailty--and their nobility.'
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Health care must account for personal cultural beliefs
I am a PhD student in Sociology and just read this book as a requirement for my assistantship work in a hospital. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a very interesting case study of the intersection of the US health care system (including its workers and clinicians) and people of different spiritual and national backgrounds. The US health care system is rigid and believes in a singular biomedical model of medical healing, and this book shows that this view does not allow room to include ... Read More
Rating:  - Must read!
I love this book! It was about a vietnamese immigrants whose daughter had epilepsy. It was a clash of cultures and looks into one major flaw of our healthcare system. The main theme language and cultural barriers that can create roadblocks to getting proper medical care. One feels for these parents and I don't think I could ever be as patient a parent as they were under these difficult circumstances. Highly recommend!!
Rating: - Catch the Spirit
Reading this extraordinary book has helped me retrieve a significant part of my soul. A deep gratitude to the author for the tremendous sensitivity, involvement and work required to write such a thorough anatomy of the limits of communication for which the Hmong culture versus the American, and epilepsy versus "normalcy" are such strong metaphors.
Rating: - One of the most remarkable books I've read
I don't keep many books for my permanent library, but this is one of them. It is a remarkable study of the meeting, misunderstanding, and ongoing struggle for harmony between Western ways and the unique culture of the Hmong people. The title story is only part, though a major one, of the book; a young Hmong girl became epileptic, and the long-running encounter of her family with Western medical traditions, hospital procedures, and cultural assumptions, occupies the greater part of the text. The ... Read More
Rating: - A must read for anyone entering the healthcare sector.
This book is a wonderful telling of both perspectives (doctors ans social services vs. the patient's family) from the healthcare and cultural issues, clashes, and understandings of a foreign family in the American healthcare system. This book will help professionals and students entering the healthcare field to better understand that cultural differences don't have to be roadblocks in their treatment plans. Learn to understand your patients better and you may learn how to better treat their medical ... Read More
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