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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
by Anne Fadiman
This book was wonderful! It is a story of a toddler Hmong girl who has epilepsy and the struggles between her parents and the doctors caring for her. The author explains the history of the Hmong people in the distant past and recently during the Vietnam War and how these histories relate to the present (actually late 1980s) situation of Hmong immigrants in the US.
The book, or at least chapters, should be required reading for medical school ethics classes. There are no easy answers to the problems faced by the family and the doctors and the author does an excellent job of presenting the situation from the parents' and physicians' perspectives. Basically, the Hmong believe that epilepsy is caused by a child's spirit being scared out of the child's body and most of their remedies for epilepsy address that perspective. The Hmong religion/religious practice is also their medicine -- the two are inseperable -- and this is never fully understood or understood at all by hospital staff. Not that it is the fault of the hospital staff because there were no adequate language or cultural translation services available. Clearly, western medicine offered her the best hope for treating the disease but the lesson from this situation is that a better outcome may have been achieved if the doctors and hospital staff could acknowledge the Lee family's perspective.
Highly recommended!
by Anne Fadiman
This book was wonderful! It is a story of a toddler Hmong girl who has epilepsy and the struggles between her parents and the doctors caring for her. The author explains the history of the Hmong people in the distant past and recently during the Vietnam War and how these histories relate to the present (actually late 1980s) situation of Hmong immigrants in the US.
The book, or at least chapters, should be required reading for medical school ethics classes. There are no easy answers to the problems faced by the family and the doctors and the author does an excellent job of presenting the situation from the parents' and physicians' perspectives. Basically, the Hmong believe that epilepsy is caused by a child's spirit being scared out of the child's body and most of their remedies for epilepsy address that perspective. The Hmong religion/religious practice is also their medicine -- the two are inseperable -- and this is never fully understood or understood at all by hospital staff. Not that it is the fault of the hospital staff because there were no adequate language or cultural translation services available. Clearly, western medicine offered her the best hope for treating the disease but the lesson from this situation is that a better outcome may have been achieved if the doctors and hospital staff could acknowledge the Lee family's perspective.
Highly recommended!
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