The Book Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down By Anne Fadiman

In Hmong’s, they have their own traditional beliefs in which they hardly ever alter due to a different atmosphere. Some of the Hmong beliefs are they prefer traditional medicine, are culturally active, host ritual ceremonies, and are spirituality influenced. In the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, refers to the Hmong culture and their beliefs on medicine while their baby Lia Lee, is suffering from epilepsy in which they have a hard decision. Traditional Hmong’s have their own medicinal beliefs which they obey prior to obtaining Western medicine. The gulf between Western medicine and Hmong health beliefs is an impossible abyss. Also, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down describes the life of Hmong refugees assimilating to

Establishing effective communication with the patient is a critical factor in promoting patient quality care. Good communication is fundamental when providing safe and effective care at the beside in order to increase the quality of patient care. One of the many communicative barriers that exists between patients and the healthcare team are language barriers. Language barriers are considered an initial problem of translation or code-switching. Individuals who speak different languages require a certain code breaker in order to facilitate effective communication (Gregg & Saha, 2007). Furthermore, language barriers may hinder the quality of patient care and interfere with optimal clinical outcomes. According to Happ et al., 2011, nurses have the unique responsibility to engage in communication with patients and have control over the timing and method of communication. Evidenced based interventions such as communication boards are needed to improve nurses’ communication skills in order to achieve effective communication.

From our text, Race, Class, and Gender, we read Unit III E: The Structure of Social Institutions; The State and Violence: Policing the National Body: Sex, Race, and Criminalization; The Color of Justice; Rape, racism, and the Law; and Interpreting and Experiencing Anti-Queer Violence : Race, Class, and Gender Differences among LGBT Hate Crime Victims. We also encountered and excerpt from Social Work Practice With a Difference; The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman. The first four reading from our text explore the association of the manner in which state power organizes race, class, and gender. We also get a view of how the intersectional approach of race, class, and gender may help us to understand some forms

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman, is the story of two very different cultures lacking understanding for one another leading to a tragedy due to cultural incompetence. Today in America there are very many different cultures. Health care providers need to be aware of cultural diversity and sensitivity when caring for patients. If a health care provider is not sensitive towards a patient’s culture it can cause a relationship of mistrust to form, lead to barriers in the plan of care, and increase health care cost. The current guidelines to promote cultural competence in the clinical setting include completing a cultural diversity self-assessment, identify the need of the population served, evaluate barriers in the community and practice, educate staff to cultural diversities, schedule longer appointments, clarify limitations, and identify alternatives offered (Cash & Glass, 2014).

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.

This applied theory paper will analyze both the macro and micro analysis of the Novel, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman (Fadiman, 1997). In the book “The Spirit Catches You and Falls Down”, the character Lia illness resulted in a cultural divide between the Hmong culture and the American culture. Throughout this paper both the conflict theory and the family systems theory will be used to examine themes of behaviors among the characters in the text. The family and medical team use the applications of a number of different social work theories to navigate through her illness implementing a number of different strategies to nurse her to health. The author Fadiman explores the Lee’s family

The Hmongs are an ethnic race, originally migrated from Eurasia and settled in river plains of China. The Chinese hated them, calling them ‘Miao’ or ‘Meo’ meaning barbarians and tried to gain mastery over them but the Hmongs wanting to be left alone began to migrate. By the beginning of the 19th century, half a million Hmongs had migrated to Indo-China. Disliking persecution, some settled in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. They detest being ordered or bullied, do not like to lose, are fighters who would rather die than surrender. Though they never possessed a country of their own, they have marched through the pages of history as free men desiring personal liberty. The Lee family travelled to Merced, California along with other Hmongs who fled to Laos in 1975, when their country became a prey to communism.

In this assignment I am going to be explaining the factors that may influence communication and interpersonal in health and social care environments and also I am going to be explaining the strategies used in health and social care environments to overcome barriers to effective communication and interpersonal interactions. I will be including sensory deprivation, foreign language, jargon, slang, dialect, acronyms, cultural differences, distress, emotional difficulties, health issues and environmental problems, misinterpretation of message, aggression, assertion and how they can be overcome.

Being a Hmong means their spiritual beliefs are a lot different than those of an American. For instance, a mother a Hmong child would birth her baby in their home with her own two hands. On the other hand, an American mother would birth her child in a hospital with medical staff. When Lia was born, she was born in the Merced Community Medical Center and at that point in her life she did not have epilepsy. At three months old Lia began having seizures. The seizures were blamed on her older sister because she once slammed a door and frightened Lia. Her parent’s belief was the slamming of the door scared her soul out of her body and made her lost. With an American family, this is not something they would typically believe in.

When the father of a new child buries the placenta under the parents’ bed, so that when the child dies they can retrieve the honored skin “jacket” (placenta) and put it on for safe travels through the spirit realm, home is a significant and integral part of being for the Hmong. In all their lengthy history the Hmong have never had soil to call their own yet their resilience in their attempt to establish roots wherever they relocate to, is

The book gives the story of Lia Lee. Lia Lee is a Hmong child with leprosy, whose problems depict the dangers that exist due to lack of cross-cultural communication that is in the medical profession. This was first identified in Lia Lee when she was three months old when her elder sister slammed the door. This made her parents Foua and Nao Kao to believe that the noise made by the slammed door made her soul flee. They even went to the extent of diagnosing her illness as quag dab peg "The spirit catches you, and you fall down." They also believed that she was so special. Lia Lee's parents decided to take her to the Merced Community Medical Centre for treatment. At the Centre, they also used the traditional

Professional Communication is a very important element in the foundation for a strong health care system. Communication can also serve as a basis for basic health care administered. Communication is not only the one tool in health care in which we can control, but also what helps prevent the derailment in patient-healthcare professional trust.. Types of model that can help express how important professional communication is within health care is the movie titled, The Doctor. There are various examples in this movie in which the importance of professional communication is portrayed and supports the argument, as well. These types of examples and supporting data can also be found in real life testimonies of what type of situations can result from lack of professional communication in the health care setting. Communication teaches the importance in human-to-human contact that some hospitals and health care setting may lack due to the certain personality type that is more attracted to the roles of doctors. Professional communication should remain at the forefront of bed side manner and proper etiquette in the health care field and setting.

Communication. Quite possibly one of the most important actions we use on a daily basis, both consciously and unconsciously. Over the last decade, though, communication, oddly enough, has become a rather serious issue when used in a workplace setting. This is especially true in the medical field. The reality is that hospitals are seeing a huge spike in communication-related issues with ethnic patients and even employees. Why? Why has one of the easiest actions for a person to learn and utilize suddenly become the hardest things for healthcare professionals to use? Geri-Ann Galanti provides the answer in her book “Caring for Patients from Different Cultures” by documenting an ICU nurse, David, who had transferred from the step-down unit to the

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

The importance of different languages and cross culture communication are imperative when it comes to adequate care for patients in the nursing field. The transcultural framework states that communication is "....a continuous process by which one person may affect another through written or oral language, gestures, facial expressions, body language, space or other symbols" (Giger and Davidhizar, 2008, pg. 20).