Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
Spirit
Faidman, Anne. (1998) The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The title of Anne Fadiman's book on the implications of multiculturalism in modern nursing sounds more like a religious testimony than a textual asset to the modern nursing profession. However, Faidman tells a tale of Biblical proportions, and the emotional nature of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is epic in its intensity. Moreover, the title is indeed descriptive, for it encompasses in its scope not simply faith, but also functions as a description of the symptoms of epilepsy that affects the patient at the book's core. The title describes how the parents of the patient viewed the symptoms of their child, in direct contrast to the representations of the modern medical system in America, whom treated this young child of recent immigrants. (Faidman, 1998)
The main theme of Faidman's book is that, for doctors and nurses, simply being medically and technically competent at one's profession is not enough, when healing a patient in general, but particularly a patient from a culture different...
The epileptic in question, Lia Lee was born in 1981 to a family of Hmong immigrants. Most of the Hmong like Lia Lee's families were refugee families who supported the losing side in Laos, from whence the Lees came during the 1970's.
Spirituality is and was at the core of the lives of most Hmong families, and they have tended to resist efforts to integrate their culture into the community, in comparison to other immigrant groups from Southeast Asia. During no point of the medical treatment of Lia Lee was this spiritual aspect ever taken into consideration or acknowledged as valuable and important in the family's emotional survival under different circumstances. Despite the fact that even in our own community, the need for linguistic translation for recent immigrants is stressed when discussion of medical terminology, no effort was made to translate the culture of Lia Lee into terms comprehensible and relevant and meaningful, spiritually and emotionally as well as linguistically, to the parents of the girl.
A second major theme of…
Works Cited
Faidman, Anne. (1998) The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Hendricks, C., Byrd, L. et al. (2001). "Self-esteem matters: Racial and gender differences among rural southern adolescents." Journal of Black Nurses Association, 12(2).
Hmong Culture Health Hmong Health Culture The Hmong people are a group of Asian-Americans who have been living in the United States since an immigration program was started in 1975. Because of their strong animistic faith and beliefs in the supernatural, they have been slow to adapt to the healthcare practices of the United States. The Hmong continue to rely on alternative medicine and faith healers to cure illnesses. Health Beliefs and Practices
Lia Lee could not be seen alone, as the doctors saw her. Their obligation was not only to her, but to her whole family. Lia Lee's brother aptly writes: I do recall everything from the door slamming incident to the day the doctors told my family that it was okay for her to come but she will not live pass 7 days. I will never forget that week or those
When the Hmong refugees encounter the peculiarities of the Western medical system, their entire worldview is called into question. Yet it is mainly the Americans who struggle. The Hmong view of health, healing, and wellness differ so sharply from that of the Americans that it is we who must examine our beliefs, not the Hmong. History has not been kind to the Hmong. Yet in some ways, this cruelty has
arrival of Hmong to the United States and delves briefly on the earlier conditions of the Hmong in Laos and Southeast Asia, their region of origin. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, by Anne Friedan is a book about the encounter between a Hmong family and the American medical community. It also goes into great detail
We know that we do not know everything in the West. However, many aspects of the Hmong are also just coming out of the Middle Ages and there is only so much that can be tolerated and there must be a demand for a middle ground in the way that western medicine and culture deals with medical issues when the science and the treatment regimen is clear. For instance,
Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman is a groundbreaking book about cross-cultural communication in health care. The book is about Lia Lee, who was the first in her Hmong family to be born in the United States. Her parents spoke no English. When Lia Lee was three months old, she had her first seizure. Due to misdiagnosis, a string of unfortunate events prevented Lia Lee from