Chapter 11 The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down

Ban Vinai, although it was dirty, crowded, and disease-ridden, at least allowed the Hmong to maintain their culture. Nomadic to escape assimilation, they remain a strong and loyal group of people with a complex system of justice and care. The narrative cites a clinical description of Lia's symptoms as "American medicine at its worst and its best. Chapter 11 the spirit catches you and you fall down menu. " The best-educated refugees came in the first wave, and the least-educated came later on. They had to have seen what was going on as people ran in and out of the critical care cubicle, but still no one stepped out to comfort them.

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When a child is involved, who's the boss -- the doctor, or the parents? But it's also a wonderful history book. Lia seizes for two hours, an unusually long time since status epilepticus or extended seizures can threaten a patient's life after 20 minutes. I feel convinced that several of the ideas here will stay with me for a while. No, I never heard of Merced before, either, and for sure the Mercedians never heard of the Hmong before 1978, but then they did. Anne Fadiman is an American author, editor and teacher. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down - Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis. October, 1997, p. 132. What I'm Taking With Me. • Where—New York, New York, USA. This détente looked good on the surface, but masked an unfixable wound to the relationship between the Lees and their daughter's doctors. The author says, "I was the staggering toll of stress that the Hmong exacted from the people who took care of them, particularly the ones who were young, idealistic, and meticulous" (p. 75). When she stopped, she was breathing but still unconscious.

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This is a great book to read if you want to try to understand any people who are different from you in any way. I find that it's easy (for me, at least) to fall into two camps when talking about different cultures and medicine. They think Neil would have healed Lia if he stayed at MCMC. How do Hmong and American birth practices differ? Reading this book felt like an applied form of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Knowing she had worked with the Hmong, I started to lament the insensitivity of Western medicine. Most families took about a month to reach Thailand, although some lived in the jungles for two years or more. There are so many valuable aspects to this book it's hard to decide what to mention. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman. They don't see the complexity of the doctors' work behind the scenes. It could have been a win-win situation but ended up being a lose-lose situation. Also not surprisingly, there was an impenetrable gulf of misunderstanding between the Californians and the Hmong. While the doctors felt that the Lees failure to keep Lia on her initial drug regime contributed to her decline, the Lees felt that the medicine itself contributed to their daughter's condition.

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Lia had been suffering from a mild runny nose for a few days and had a diminished appetite. Having known these guys for years, I was under the impression – wrong, as it turns out – that they were all secular humanists). My wife would ask me what I was saying, and I'd tell her "I'm not talking to you I'm talking to the book! " Shut up and go home with your hypocritical and ethnocentric ideas.

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Nevertheless, the central conflict of her story pits the Lees versus her doctors. They wanted to remain as Hmong as they could. The spinal tap they administer is particularly upsetting to Foua and Nao Kao, who believe the procedure will cripple her. It's ostensibly about a young Hmong girl with epilepsy and her family's conflict with the American medical establishment, and there is much about them here. Ultimately, it led to problems. Chapter 11 the spirit catches you and you fall down pdf. During the course of this book, I found myself audibly voicing my opinions at the page like a crazy person. Fadiman, a columnist for Civilization and the new editor of The American Scholar, met the Lees, a Hmong refugee family in Merced, Calif., in 1988, when their daughter Lia was already seven years old and, in the eyes of her American doctors, brain dead. Just like the hero of the greatest Hmong folktale, Shee Yee, who escaped nine evil dab brothers by shapeshifting into many different animals, the Hmong have always been able to find ways to get out of tight spots. In the course of reading this book, I have redefined my idea of what constitutes a good doctor. My dad and I once drove from Paris to Normandy. By the time the final seizure came for Lia Lee, her family actively distrusted the people working at the Merced Community Medical Center. The author also speaks of other doctors who were able to communicate with the Hmong.

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Lia is placed in the care of a foster family. These are only some of the questions that arise from the book. Foua and Nao Kao mistakenly believe Lia is being transported because Neil is going on vacation. I wanted the word to get out in the community that if they deviated from that, it was not acceptable behavior" (p. 79). She does say that it would be impossible for Western medical practitioners to think that "our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself". This is the heartbreaking story of Lia, a Hmong girl with epilepsy in Merced. A visiting nurse in the book angered me by telling the Lees they should raise rabbits to eat instead of buying rats at the pet store. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, a collection of first-person essays on books and reading, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1998. Chapter 11 the spirit catches you and you fall down litcharts. There is definitely no separation between the physical and the spiritual. The statements from Lia's medical charts often have an odd formal tone inconsistent with the emotional nature of the events they describe. I don't know where I stand now on the concept of assimilation. And is there any way to bridge those gaps completely?

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Her fingers and toes were blue, her blood pressure was dangerously low, and her temperature was 104. They also showed that he had an elevated temperature, diarrhea, and a low blood platelet count. To the very end, she was treated with unwavering love and care by her family. How should we handle these differences? It is difficult to acknowledge that no one was right but so easy to fall into a trap of uneasiness and ignorance in the face of the Other, writing such people off as enemies. Anyone going into the medical/social work/psychology field should read this book. Anne Fadiman is the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Reporting, she has written for Civilization, Harper's, Life, and the New York Times, among other publications. The parents who did not follow their doctors' orders? Long story short, a lot of them congregated in Merced, in California.

OK, let me step off of my soapbox...... Sadly, and not surprisingly, those who would probably most benefit from a book like this would probably be the ones least likely to read it. Cultural brokers are important! It is supposed to be 'rational' and evidence-based. This book also taught me about the American medical system - it looks strange when you step back.

The Hmong revere their elders and believed that the proper funeral rites were necessary for the souls of the deceased to find rest; thus, leaving them to die and their bodies to rot was a horrible choice to have to make.