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The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down By Lia Lee

1369 Words6 Pages

The Spirit Catches You The Spirit Catches you and You fall down centers on Lia Lee, an epileptic Hmong Child who is caught in-between care of her loving parents and the responsibility of her caring doctors. Her parents are traditional Hmong’s who are hesitant towards American medicinal methods compared to Hmong traditional methods. While on the other side stands her American doctors, who were educated in American Universities and are for the most part are very much against treating Lia with anything besides the practice they’ve been educated on. This paper will first provide a short summary of the book which will mainly include the Hmong involvement in the Vietnam War. Followed by two anthropological concepts. The first which will analyze …show more content…

When visiting Laos a woman interviewing the Hmong was asked many questions about the American medical system. Questions such as why did American doctors take so much blood, why did they eat brains? This was of course false information; American doctors were much different than the shamans the Hmong were custom too. An example of this is time spent with a patient. While an American doctor will make a patient drive to their office, wait for a long period, and only actually see their doctor for a mere 20 minutes. While a shaman would come to a home and spend up to eight hours with the patient. Shamans never asked rude questions, while American doctors would. Shamans made an immediate diagnosis of the patient, while an American doctor sometimes could never figure out what was wrong with the patient. At the end of the book a shaman is called to bring Lia out of her vegetative state. The shaman can’t lose if he doesn’t bring her back from the land of the unseen he couldn’t be blamed for it. If a doctor however was given the chance to save Lia’s life and failed, they would be blamed for it. There was a feeling amongst the Hmong that because American doctors were so different than the Hmong medical system they were used too, they were more likely to cause harm than restore it. The Lee’s were no different in their judgment of American doctors, throughout the book it was clear that they cared about Lia very much and wanted the seizures that plagued her to stop, but their knowledge of medicine and health clashed with Western medicine and caused the seizures to increase rather than decrease. On the other side of the spectrum stood the American doctors who were more to blame than the parents for Lia’s permanent vegetative state. They didn’t adhere to simple the Hmong culture that would gain the Lee’s respect and understanding. Their

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