The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Analysis

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997) is an ethnography written by Anne Faidman. It tells the story of Lia Lee, a Hmong girl with severe epilepsy, and her family’s journey with managing the condition and the cultural barriers that posed great challenges in Lia’s care. Lia was diagnosed with epilepsy at age 1. It was her family’s opinion that the condition was a spiritual gift. Lia’s parents, Nao Kao and Foua, were wary of the American medical system, preferring to treat Lia in the Hmong way. Under the more spiritually focused care of her parents, Lia continued to have severe seizures; at the age of 4 ½, she slipped into a coma that would last the rest of her life. This book serves as a testament to the importance of cultural competency

The Celebration of Misfortunes In chapter eight of Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, the author describes her arrival in Merced in 1988 and the awkward interactions she has with the Hmong community. Fadiman meets a psychologist named Sukey Walker who helps her realize that by being respectful and having a good translator she could earn the trust of the Hmong community. Fadiman brings a translator named Max Ying Xiong to her meetings with the Lees which helps her gain trust because her translator was related to the Lees through marriage.

What would it be like to come to a country and not understand anything about its health care system? In The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman brings to light the conflicts between a Hmong family’s cultural beliefs, and that of the traditional western medical beliefs of the American doctors they come into contact with. Fadiman shows the consistent tug of war between the Hmong culture and the Western American medical practice. The Lee family comes from a culture that believes in holistic healing. They have an animalistic view in regards to health and medicine. The cultural barriers between the two eventually leads to the detrimental fate of the Lee’s daughter Lia.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures written by Anne Fadmin writes “As William Osler once said – or is said to have said – ‘Ask not what disease the person has, but rather what person the disease has” (p. 275). This statement has significant meaning throughout this book especially when it came to the story of Lia. Lia was a young Hmong girl who suffered from Epilepsy. Due the Hmong culture playing a significant role in Lia's care, it caused communication barriers between Lia's parents and the health care professionals dealing this family that led to heartbreaking decisions.

While reading “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” written by Anne Fadiman, I found how interesting it was to learn about the history of the Hmong people. These groups of people have been through a lot in history, and they fought to keep their culture alive when the Chinese people attacked them for not assimilating to their culture. The Hmong people have different birthing tradition then those of Americans. The Hmong people believed in “Dabs,” which is evil spirits that can steal the baby’s soul. When Lia was taken to MCMC for seizures, we see the conflict that both the doctor and parents had towards communication, which included different diagnosis by the doctors from the diagnosis of the parents. The Hmong people also believe that it is taboo to have surgery or blood

In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Lia’s health complications could have been prevented or alleviated if the doctors had taken the cultural differences, cultural belief and practices of the Hmong community into account. While doctors in this book had received a Western type of foundation in terms of their medical preparation, this book demonstrated that how the life of a patient could have been improved when he/she is examined holistically.

Anne Fadiman struggles to find the answer to who is responsible for Lia Lee’s health in her book, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.” The book describes the clashing of both the medical community within Merced, California, and a Hmong refugee family, the Lees, cultural beliefs. The Lees daughter, Lia Lee, is plagued with a severe case of epilepsy, or qaug dab peg in Hmong, as a child and is administered to the Mercy Medical Center Merced, or MCMC, a hospital in Merced, California. The doctors there go through many struggles in order to work with the Lee family, as they are faced with cultural and language barriers that they must overcome in order to ensure Lia is in good health. The Lees do not feel that they are in the wrong, for their

One of the remedies used for Lia for her epileptic episodes was her parents would rub her skin with coins, elicit sickness with an egg, and or call in a tvix neeb a shaman granted power from Shee Yee. A lot of which back in the day did not have any correlation with western medicine and doctors. Many of the procedures done on patients were taboo in Hmong tradition. Because of the power structures of many Hmong families doctors would have to go through so much more to do simple tasks. Such as drawing blood, according to Hmong culture a person only has so much blood and when drawn it will shorten the person's lifespan. This went with many of the procedures done deteriorating the relationships between Hmong patients and

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.

Culture plays a major role in the spirit catches you and you fall by Ann Fadiman. Every chapter shares some aspect of Hmong history and culture: food, clothing, language, family structure, birthing rituals, and so on. The Hmong traditionally lived high in the mountains of Laos, where they practiced agriculture and subsisted primarily on rice, vegetables, herbs, and occasionally pork and chicken if the family could afford it. They believe most diseases have a spiritual cause that can be alleviated through traditional forms of healing such as rubbing the skin with coins, creating a vacuum by igniting cotton soaked in alcohol under a tiny cup, or drawing disease out with an egg. A tvix neeb, or shaman, could conduct more powerful healing; such a figure is thought to be able to get rid of evil spirits called dabs and retrieve lost souls. Certain aspects of Hmong culture, such as taboos against medical procedures, often conflict with the western culture of medicine, resulting in communication issues. Other aspects, such as utilizing animal sacrifice in shamanic ceremonies, to heal have led to conflicts with the American doctors to the point that rituals were banned in hospitals. Lia lees outcome was preventable if communication between both Hmong

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a book by Anne Fadiman about a Hmong family (the Lee’s) that moved to the United States. It deals with their child Lia, her American doctors, and the collisions of those two cultures. In Fadiman’s unbiased book I learned that there are many cultural differences between Hmong and Americans concerning opinions, stubbornness, and misunderstandings.

Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down addresses experiences and decisions we may all relate to in some degree through the point of view of a journalist. It offers a different perspective and insight that has been used as an acceptable resource on cultural competence. As a passive reader, our understanding of cultural competence has grown more humanistic, because we feel the healthcare provider’s frustration and their concerns becoming more salient, while we see how a breakdown in communication, can have heartbreaking results as felt by the Lees. I think the book’s by-product is a lesson in cultural competence that can educate health care, but it is also a story that is much more dynamic as it reflects upon the sociopolitical struggle of the Hmong Chinese, xenophobia, and reminds us of a dark period of time in American history, the Vietnam War. This story, sadly, highlights the struggle of refugees, their decision to assimilate or not, which is unfortunately still relevant to this day. At some points in the book, I was immediately making connections between the Hmong Chinese and the current crisis of Syrian refugees of today. This story nonetheless is a riveting account of the life of Lia Lee and her family struggling to understand their daughter’s epilepsy through Western medicine, and the compassionate, but overtaxed providers of her care, which give us an honest glimpse into the medical world.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a cultural comparison between two cultures Hmong from Laos and a modern public hospital in California’s San Joaquin Valley. The Lee family fled Laos after communist forces took over their country migrating to the United States. Lia was their fourteenth child born in the United States and diagnosed with severe epilepsy. The book is a collection of multiple interviews to develop a story and is a collection of the writer’s interpretations of her observations, following the Lee family that immigrated to California from Laos. It explores two very different cultures and the clashes that occurred when they come together in the California medical system.

Throughout the history of medicine there has always been a need for shared commitment to ideals of moral, ethical and humane practice. The Hippocratic Oath, created by a compilation of works largely based on Hippocrates, has always stood as guidelines for the conduct of physicians. The Classical oath has and continues to serve well in preserving the sanctity of the medical profession while developing a basis for the respectful treatment of patients. However, this out-dated oath is not equipped to handle the modern trials and tribulations faced by physicians and health care in general. Many of its principles are simply unrealistic and inapplicable in today’s society. For this reason a revised version of the oath was written. As I will

In Hmong culture seizures are not recognized much as a physical illness as it is spiritual in nature and quab dab peg which translates to, the spirit catches you and you fall down, describes the group of symptoms experienced by Lia in the Hmong culture. The Lee’s were both happy and sad about Lia’s seizures. In Hmong culture seizures are considered to have special powers and usually become Shamans, but at the same time the Lees were worried about their child’s health.