Spirit Catches You Essay 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 Feb 07, · This page of the essay has words. Download the full version above. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman is about a Hmong family and their experience with the United States healthcare system. The Lee family are refugees from Laos, the parents Nao Kao and Foua Lee came to America and resided in Merced, California with the Estimated Reading Time: 10 mins Nov 30, · In the Hmong culture, people born with epilepsy are believed to be the anointed ones and are destined to a life as a shaman. They call it “qaug dab peg,” or “the spirit catches you and you fall down. ” People in the medical profession did not understand the concept of spirits and the importance of epilepsy for the blogger.comted Reading Time: 11 mins
Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down Essay Example
Spirit Catches The spirit catches you and you fall down essay 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 receiving the best possible care.
Moreover, she was wrested from her family of origin and placed in foster care. The disruption to her lifethe misdiagnosis, and the lack of communication between the health care team and her family led to her eventual death after decades in a persistent vegetative state. The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down has become critical reading material for all health care workers seeking to provide the best quality of care in a multicultural environment. Lia Lee had epilepsy, a condition known as qaug dab peg in the Hmong culture.
Qaug dab peg is regarded "with ambivalence" by the spirit catches you and you fall down essay Hmong, according to Fadiman p. This is not to say that Hmong treat the condition lightly; rather, they treat the condition quite seriously but just not in the same manner as Western medicine. Fadiman makes it clear that the Hmong have a historic and cohesive system of shamanic medicine with its own lexicon, diagnostic, and treatment procedures. The diagnosis of qaug dab peg entails various shamanic rituals and treatments designed to reunite a wandering soul with the suffering body.
A diagnosis of qaug dab peg is not viewed as a disease in the same paradigm as Western medicine. Rather, qaug dab peg is viewed primarily as a spiritual condition that is to the spirit catches you and you fall down essay accepted and worked with from within a Hmong perspective. Quag dab peg is translated as "the spirit catches you and you fall down," referring to the sinister dab spirit that steals souls.
The Lee family did not want their daughter to undergo invasive surgery, or to take powerful anticonvulsive medications like ampicillin and Dilantin to control seizures and other drugs to counteract symptoms and conditions like pneumonia. However, Lia Lee's seizures became too frequent and severe to ignore, and outside of their Laotian villages they could not find shamanic treatments to help their daughter.
They would have preferred that Lia Lee see a traditional Hmong doctor, who would perform the traditional rites that constitute healing and medicine in their culture. Eventually, the parents took Lia Lee back to the hospital.
Once they took this vital step of using the American health care system, they essentially surrendered the right to care for Lia Lee in the manner they believed was best. American law entitles the health care team to make decisions on behalf of Lia Lee in order to save her life.
In the case of Lia Lee, unfortunately, the decisions that were made ended up being detrimental even if the doctors and health care team had the child's best interest at heart. The Lee family made the long journey to the United States with virtually no money. They lived in refugee camps in Thailand before arriving in California.
Their eventual destination was Merced, which already had a pre-established Hmong refugee community. Because of the existence of the Hmong refugee community in Merced, it seems criminal that the doctors at Merced Community Medical Center did not try harder to find a translator for the family when they recognized Lia Lee's condition.
Had communication been established from the onset, many of Lia Lee's problems might not have manifest. Communication might have alleviated the parents' fears about the nature of Western medicine. The model of Western medicine is paternalistic, which assumes patient ignorance and often deliberately preserves patient ignorance by cloaking health and illness in jargon.
Because Hmong culture is particularly resistant to foreign authority, Fadiman points out the problems with a paternalistic medical model especially when dealing with patients who would prefer to be treated and consulted with deeper respect. The health care team in this case believed they were doing the right thing because they were following procedure, but they did not necessarily act out of respect.
The health care team viewed the Hmong beliefs as being primitive and actually as being irrelevant, The Hmong view paternalistic medicine "not as a gift, but as a form of coercion," Fadiman No one on the health care team tried to explain why the invasive procedures being used on Lia Lee were possibly saving the child's life.
The Hmong have historically resisted cultural assimilation, to the point where independence is built into the Hmong identity. Anthropologists who have interacted with Hmong have noted, the spirit catches you and you fall down essay, as Fadiman points out, the lengths to which Hmong have gone and will go to ensure the integrity of their culture.
When the Hmong arrived in the United States, they did not intend to "become American" but to remain Hmong. As Fadiman puts it, the The spirit catches you and you fall down essay do not "melt well" They want to be left alone; they have no ambitions of having power over other peopleany more than they want to be subjugated by others.
The American medical model is designed to strip power away from patients and families by restricting choice, and creating a frightful environment. Hospitals are also bureaucratic systems, which the Hmong hold in particularly low regard Fadiman.
It is no wonder that the Lee family resisted care. From their perspective, the doctors and other members of the health care team were making Lia Lee's condition worse. Hmong shamans txiv neeb might actually be able to teach American doctors, just as American doctors might be able to teach the shamans.
Complementary medicine models allow for dialogue and discourse between different paradigmatic systems. The two systems discussed in the Fadiman book are radically different, but at their core is a desire to help patients. Shamans can teach doctors that viewing the human body as a machine can be counterproductive to healing, the spirit catches you and you fall down essay. Some illnesses can be framed as spiritual conditions that offer the individual an opportunity to explore existential issues.
Invasive therapies and methods can lead to mental misery, which can impede healing. Western medicine does not take into account systems like family, culture, spiritualityand community. Western doctors can dispel superstitious beliefs that are unnecessary, without sacrificing the framework of traditional mythologies and cosmologies.
For example, it could have easily been said that the intravenous tubes were not draining Lia Lee of her bloodbut were providing her with a magical elixir that could help restore the soul to her body. If the Hmong have a preference for storytelling and myth, then Western medicine can be framed in this way.
A simple attempt to explain that Western doctors are doing what they do because it saves lives would help the Hmong understand that txiv neeb are not the only healers. Western doctors might be able to explain that certain interventions are designed to be temporary, or to treat acute problems. When those interventions do not work, then spiritual methods can be used as well.
There does not need to be a conflict between traditional the spirit catches you and you fall down essay allopathic medicine.
According to Fadiman, the "greatest of all Hmong folktales" is the story of Shee Yee. Shee Yee is the archetypal shaman, a "healer and magician " who was ambushed by nine evil dabs Fadiman The evil dab brothers ate Shee Yee's flesh and drank Shee Yee's blood. Important symbolic parallels can be made between Lia Lee and Shee Yee, as their flesh was poked and prodded, their blood sucked and sampled. The evel dab brothers waited to ambush Shee Yee, at a crossroads, a strong motif in many traditional tales.
The crossroads represents critical moments of choice. In the Shee Yee story, nine different paths correspond with the nine evil brothers. The evil brothers transformed themselves into water buffalo, and so too did the clever Shee Yee. However, Shee Yee quickly changed back to the spirit catches you and you fall down essay man and chopped up the evil brothers.
The evil brothers continued to fight back, but Shee Yee remains a step ahead. The dab brothers continue to shape shift and transform, with Shee Yee counteracting their moves until finally Shee Yee "went home to his wife," Fadiman, p. The story represents the ongoing struggle of the Hmong against hostile forces, and the remarkable cleverness and resilience the Hmong have exhibited. Unfortunately, as Fadiman points out, not all Hmong immigrants have fared well with many being victims of violent crimes in America due to their inherently trusting nature.
The Hmong social norms are such that violence against others and theft are strongly taboo, the spirit catches you and you fall down essay. When Lia Lee is placed in foster care, the situation is viewed as stealing the child.
Lia Lee does not do well in her first foster care situation, when the Mennonite sisters attempt to address the needs of the child. After a few weeks, Lia Lee is returned, but the foster care battle….
Reference Fadiman, A. The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down. New York: Farrar, the spirit catches you and you fall down essay, Straus, and Giroux. The family would certainly have been more comfortable if the hospital made more of an effort to understand their culture and beliefs.
The Lees were treated as if they were indignant and unresponsive to the needs of their child which was not the case at all. The hospital could have enlisted the help of affluent Hmong natives who have become more accustomed to American traditions. This person could have helped. Within this clash of cultures, the Lee family did not know how to cope with the medical system in place to help Lia and her epilepsy.
When they refused to give her the medications, Lia was removed from the home and placed in foster care.
When the foster care parents gave her the prescribed medication, her condition worsened in several important ways. The foster parents believe that Lia's parents realized. Spirit Faidman, Anne. 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 the spirit catches you and you fall down essay 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. Yet the nightmare continued, because the communication problems were not resolved.
During the next four years, her anticonvulsant medicines were changed about 25 times, which would have been hell for any family. The Lees questioned the value of so many prescriptions, the spirit catches you and you fall down essay, especially with their Hmong mindset, and did not follow directions.
Of course, this was exacerbated by the fact that they did not understand the dosages. The doctors inaccurately concluded. The concern is that the issue of healthcare for culturally diverse individuals is so complex, there are no exact rights and wrongs. To a culture that didn't use calendars, giving a certain medicine at a certain hour of the day was incomprehensible. Neil and Peggy didn't consider that a somewhat less effective, but easier-to-follow drug regimen may have been better given the state of affairs.
Instead, the Western idea of doing as much as medically possible for as long as medically possible prevailed.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
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Apr 28, · Anne Fadiman wrote a successful award-winning book called, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which highlights how the cultural differences between the Hmong culture and American medicine jeopardized the health of a little girl named Lia Lee. The story brings into light the topic of Medical anthropology, which is the study of medical systems, healing Feb 07, · This page of the essay has words. Download the full version above. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman is about a Hmong family and their experience with the United States healthcare system. The Lee family are refugees from Laos, the parents Nao Kao and Foua Lee came to America and resided in Merced, California with the Estimated Reading Time: 10 mins Essay On The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down. Words8 Pages. Overview of the book. In the book “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” author Anne Fadiman presents a character who suffered from epilepsy as a Hmong child who born on July 19, , in Merced, California. Being the fourteenth child of Foua Yang and Nao Kao Lee, Lia Lee was their
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