Chronic Tough Case Study

What happens when two very different or even mutually exclusive cultural perspective are forced into contact with one another? In Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, there is a division between the shamanistic insubordinate cultural of Hmong refugees in Merced, California and the cold analytical approach of western medicine. In the early 1980s, the child of a Hmong refugee family in Merced, California is born with epilepsy, her name is Lia Lee. Anne Fadiman traces the interaction between these two cultures and Lia’s disease, she reviews that misunderstanding and miscommunication can have calamitous consequences for all involved. The author introduces many characters throughout the book and they all

Many years ago, an epileptic Hmong girl named Lia Lee entered a permanent vegetative state due to cross-cultural misunderstanding between her parents and her doctors. An author named Anne Fadiman documented this case and tried to untangle what exactly went wrong with the situation. Two key players in her narrative were Neil Ernst and Peggy Philp, the main doctors on Lia’s case. As Fadiman describes, “Neil and Peggy liked the Hmong, too, but they did not love them… [W]henever a patient crossed the compliance line, thus sabotaging their ability to be optimally effective doctors, cultural diversity ceased being a delicious spice and became a disagreeable obstacle.” (Fadiman 265) At first glance, this statement seems to implicate Neil and Peggy as morally blameworthy for a failure to be culturally sensitive enough. However, upon further inspection of the rest of the book, it becomes clear that Neil and Peggy’s failure to be more culturally sensitive to their Hmong patients was caused by structural issues in the American biomedical system. To prove this point, this paper will first present a background to Lia’s case, then discuss possibilities for assigning blame to Neil and Peggy, then show evidence for the structural issues in American biomedicine, before finally concluding.

Lia Lee was a Hmong infant born with epilepsy. Lia’s parents were immigrants to a Western nation. However, the parents held tightly onto traditional beliefs from their native country. The incongruent belief structure of the East and West created difficulty when the two systems collided in an effort to care for Lia Lee. Specifically, when the drug therapy prescribed for Lia Lee was not followed by her parents. Subsequently the child’s medical team contacted child services, which lead to Lia’s removal from her family. The result of the cultural misunderstanding was fragmented family. In addition to fueling the distrust of the western healthcare system by an already marginalized community.

One of the larger aspects of this book is cultural collision. This can be seen from the many times Lia and the doctors would disagree with each other because of their cultural differences. The Lee’s

“In the Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”, Anne Fadiman explores the subject of cross cultural misunderstanding. This she effectively portrays using Lia, a Hmong, her medical history, the misunderstandings created by obstacles of communication, the religious background, the battle with modernized medical science and cultural anachronisms. Handling an epileptic child, in a strange land in a manner very unlike the shamanistic animism they were accustomed to, generated many problems for her parents. The author dwells on the radically different cultures to highlight the necessity for medical communities to have an understanding of the immigrants when treating them.

In Lu Hsun’s short story “Medicine” brings an autobiographical and mystery element that highlights certain faults of Chinese socialism. According to the mandate of heaven an individual with given power, typically the emperor, has the right to rule the divine power. However, “Medicine” dichotomizes traditional Chinese culture by ridiculing that their really isn’t an essential culture. Lu Hsun critiques Confusion principle by comparing it through “cannibalistic” attributes. “Medicine” warns readers that the Confucian tradition will consume the future and does this through three important key factors: bringing opposite concepts to reveal the author 's

This book, as narrated by the author, Anne Fadiman, is about the true story of the life of an epileptic Hmong child named Lia Lee, and her refugee family’s interactions with the American health care system. This child endures agonizing grand mal seizures which ultimately and unfortunately, as a result, led her to become vegetative for the rest of her life. However, the central idea of this story is not entirely about Lia’s severe epilepsy, but how cultural boundaries had prompted to the obstruction of her treatment. Compliance had a major effect on Lia’s life between the doctors and her family, in which this argumentative battle is a way of implicitly revealing the differences in Western and Eastern medication, how the patient is perceived

A physician must be well rounded in a variety of fields to provide effective care. First, an interest in learning scientific knowledge must be accompanied by the ability to translate that knowledge into methods of treatment. Because science is constantly changing and improving, a physician should be continuously expanding their scientific learning within and outside of their respective fields. Most of the coursework that I have taken reflects my interest in the intersection between biomedical science and its applications through an anthropological lens. For example, I have performed public

51). In reading Anna Fadiman book, we find that language, culture and belief barriers can cause a delay in giving proper treatment to patients. Cultural and geographical borders within any society are believed to create boundaries that limit similarities between those on opposite sides.

‘The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures’ is a book written in 1997 by the author Anne Fadiman. This book is based on a true story of the life of a Hmong child, Lia Lee who is epileptic. She suffers from numerous grand mal seizures and eventually she becomes vegetative for the remainder of her life. The intention of this book, however, is not Lia’s condition, but to highlight the problems that exist between the two cultures and the constant battles that Lia’s doctors and parents face due to the cultural barriers that exist between them. This is not just only a story of an ill child but about the more diverse battle between Eastern and Western medicine and how each view and treat patients in such different ways. In this essay the different health-seeking strategies used during Lia’s illness, the contrasting views between Lia’s parents and the American healthcare professionals and the theories of illness causation will be discussed.

This book displayed many intercultural misunderstandings and issues that happened to be the focal point of the entire storyline. In my eyes, there were three major intercultural misunderstandings that really created the twists and turns within the storyline. The first intercultural misunderstanding was the difference in meaning for the condition known as, epilepsy. The Hmong culture believes that Lia's condition was not a disease or medical condition of any kind. Instead, they believe that a specific spirit had captured Lia’s soul

In the spring of 1983, Henry Zhu, accompanied by his parents and older brother, immigrated from Guangzhou, China to Brooklyn, New York with nothing more than 2 suitcases and $2000 of pocket money for the family. His parents, a physician and school principal, decided to uproot their family and migrate to the United States because of the success from close relatives, who had immigrated to New York approximately a decade prior for better education and better paying job opportunities. Both Henry and his brother sought to follow in their father’s footsteps as a physician, and with America’s prestigious educational system, it seemed obvious at the time for their family to do so. Although adapting to the culture and environment, while having to live stringently from economic hardships, was difficult, Henry was able to fulfill the dream that was instilled in the minds of both him and his parents, as he continued his higher education at Harvard College and Harvard Medical School to reach his present day status as a cardiothoracic surgeon.

In Barefoot Doctors and Western Medicine in China, Xiaoping Fang argues that barefoot doctors were responsible for the transformation in how medicine and healthcare was implemented in rural China. Their main role was to alleviate pressure from the medical system as a whole by carrying out measures such as preventative care, health education, sanitation, immunization, family planning, and many other basic health care reforms. Prior to the advent of the barefoot doctor system, there were healers and practitioners of Chinese medicine but there was no standardized health care system, nor was the healthcare implemented biomedical. Barefoot doctors were conducive to the introduction of western medicine to rural China. Barefoot doctors were also part of the initiative to include social determinants as one of the biggest factors of health. As a result, barefoot doctors and their mission serve as the perfect intersection of health, medicine, politics, and economics. Because the barefoot doctor program was initiated by the state, they upheld the policies of the government but they also worked in the best interest of the rural population of China. One way they did this is by upholding the state’s desires to focus on eradicating diseases that were common in rural China.

Furthermore, in this book, Frank argues that the modernist perception of disease is a structure of "colonization," which also means that the sick individual surrender his or her body, and the narrative of his or her life to biomedical skill. In a post-modern conception, the sick individuals will find the defense and strength to tell their own story, regain the expert and energy to recount his or her own story. It takes one to create a new lifestyle narrative from the

In other words an image that was used in order to be able to properly diagnose and contain the disease through inoculation and that was a symbol of technological prowess in the eyes of the Chinese had become a symbol for underdevelopment, as the Chinese came to be identified with a vulnerability to disease. The goal of this book is to trace the development and the origins of the various medical iconographies that ended up connecting the Chinese identity with illness subjugation at the dawn of modernity. By doing so, it tries to point the various outlines of the varied contexts in which the meanings of medical representations were created and transformed in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It focuses on the medical rhetoric, the study and application of persuasive language and symbols in medicine, and the iconography of missionaries in China that brought back to the West this perception of a sick China or otherwise known as “Sick Man of Asia” (Heinrich, pg 4). Furthermore, it also studies how these ideas found their way back to China through missionaries, early translations of Western medical texts to Chinese, and through Chinese literature itself. Ultimately, it not only tries to point out the importance