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The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Analysis

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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a story about Anne Fadiman’s anthropological research on a Hmong family. The particular family she studies is the Lees, who traveled from Laos and settled in Merced, CA. The family was immediately in ultimate culture shock in their new surroundings. The mother, who had delivered all of her babies alone, had her first experience delivering a baby in a hospital. During her stay the language barrier kept her from understanding her doctors but she was pleased when they brought her daughter, Lia Lee, to her. At only three months old, Lia became having what Western Medicine calls epilepsy. However, her family diagnosed her with quag dab peg which translates as “the sprit catches you and you fall down.” This became a huge cross-cultural misunderstanding. The US medical doctors could not open their eyes to the Hmong culture and the Lees could not understand their Western Medicine. The Hmong believed that when Lia’s older sister slammed the door at Lia’s hu plig ceremony which …show more content…

Fadiman believes Lia’s life was “ruined not by septic shock or noncompliant parents but by cross-cultural misunderstanding” (Fadiman 1997). The Lee’s were not the only ones suffering from not understanding, the doctors were struggling with it as well. A clear example is found in chapter thirteen when the doctor has her parents sign a waiver that says if they take her home she will die. In the Hmong culture this is highly offensive and they believed that telling them this would cause evil spirits to get closer to Lia’s soul. This showed readers that it was just as important that the doctors understand the Lees cultural healing so that they could’ve worked together in Lia’s illness. One of her doctors, Dr. Neil Ernst, claimes that biomedicine was the only way to treats Lia’s illness but this is untrue in the culture of Hmong because biomedicine only treats the

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This book proved that in the end, neither way of thinking was completely wrong or completely right. Both the medical community and the Lees should have sought out ways in which they were able to better come to an agreement. For instance, the medical community could have tried to find a translator for the Lees which could have helped them both determine proper medical procedures. They also could have decided to learn more about the Hmong culture to have some understanding of where the Lees were coming from and avoid any barriers for them to better treat Lia. A big drawback that the medical community made was having a pessimistic outlook to Lia’s critical condition.

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“The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” by Anna Fadiman tells the story of Lia Lee, a Hmong child with epilepsy, whose life could have been different if only her family was caught up in western medicine. This book reveals the tragic struggles between a doctor and patient because of lack of communication. When Lia was around three months old, her older sister Yer accidentally slammed a door and Lia had suddenly fallen into the floor. This is the first recorded time that Lia was experiencing an epileptic shock.

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After getting back home and four months were over, Lia developed status epilepticus which saw her spend two weeks in the hospital. After months she experienced yet another intensified seizure, which was unending. It resulted that the child suffered septic shock, a state that made her brain to have an irreversible damage. By assuming that the child would die, her doctors permitted the family to have her stay at home.

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First, she could have made herself fit into the Hmong culture and be part of them then look like perceiving the American doctors medical healing to be a behavioral side effect and mistrust that could not heal their daughter (Westby, p.132). Then she could have went ahead and finding all the relevant information about her culture and why they are so spiritual and naïve of going for medical treatment for her sister Lia Lee. Secondly, she could have gone into the American hospitals and tried to find out why they believe in medicine much and not spiritual healing and thus she could have gotten enough information which could have made her a better anthropologist. The methods she majorly used to gather her data as sources for writing her book were reading of the medical journals thus medical anthropology and listening to several lectures that build her

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It wasn’t until a couple of seizures later that the hospital understood that that the baby was suffering from seizures. Lia was to begin a strict regime of medication which was to limit the number of seizures. Because the Lee’s did not fully understand the medication and saw the epileptic seizures as part of the divine, the Lee’s did not stick to the medication as prescribed. What follows are a series of seizures, hospitalizations,

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Nao Kao did not understand why his daughter was tied down, revoking more of his trust in the health care system he kept removing them. This is a perfect example of how easily communication and trusting nurse-client relationship could have prevented this misunderstanding and ambiguity. Peggy and Neil prescribed numerous medications for Lia over the course of her hospital visits. Nao Kao and Foua did not speak or read English, leading her to keep seizing because she did not have enough Phenobarbital in her blood, “Foua and Nao Kao, of course, had no idea what the labels said” (p.46). American doctors believed decreasing the risk of the seizures as more important, and the Lee’s viewed Lia’s nature and personality as more significant.

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In Anne Fadiman’s book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, two cultures clash with each other in the struggle to save Lia Lee, a Hmong child refugee with severe epilepsy. Although Lee and her family live in the United States, and thus receive medical care from Westerners, her family believes that Lee’s condition is sacred and special. The following miscommunications, both culturally and lingually, between the American doctors and the Lee family leave Lia Lee in comatose at the end of the book. However, Lia Lee could have been saved if the Lee’s had a better understanding of the American doctors’ intentions, and the American doctors understood the Hmong culture. Essentially, the tragedy of Lia Lee can be attributed to the clash of American and Hmong cultures at both the surface and sub-surface level.

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The Hmong community motivation to engage in this war revealed to be more culturally based than politically based in the sense that both imperialism and communism represented

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The biomedical worldview is based on the idea that the body is a machine, and illness is caused by a malfunction of that machine. Treatment is focused on fixing the malfunction, often through the use of drugs, surgery, or other medical interventions. In contrast, the Hmong worldview sees illness as a sign of a spiritual imbalance, and the cure is focused on restoring that

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The topic of birth is an interesting one and is explicitly found in the book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. There was a vivid difference between the Hmong traditional practices and the way Lia was born. It is to each and every ones own opinion to think and have a take on the differing birth practices. I find them to be odd, and extremely unorthodox especially in modern times however going back less than a hundred years, talking to my great grandmother, that is the way people gave birth. At home, wherever they were, they would work until the day they gave birth and the had to take the baby out themselves, wash it and cut the cord.

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B: Australians are used to thinking that a journey is physical but they never think that the journey could be a spiritual one. In Jackie French’s 1993 novel, ‘Walking the Boundaries’ Martin, the main character, goes on a physical and spiritual journey where he learns about his family’s past and the importance of looking after the land. A: Thesis Statement: Jackie French uses third person narrative, an obvious plot and descriptive language to intrigue and engage the reader to see the physical and spiritual journey that Martin goes on.

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Skloot showed that the lack of consent and uninformed patients, by the use of logical conventions, not only ran through the family’s history but still occurred to them

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They didn’t know what to do when they found out that she was pregnant; they were young, they didn’t have any money, they were scared, they didn’t want to tell anybody, they didn’t know what to do, and the only option that they could see was to terminate the pregnancy. So that’s what they decided to do… they went to a clinic, they had the procedure done, and at first they felt relieved that all their problems had gone away. But then something happened that they did not expect… and that’s over the next few weeks, which turned into a few months, they began to feel an intense sadness… and a pain and an agony and a guilt that wouldn’t go away. They didn’t know what to do, so they finally went to see a counselor; they said look — tell us what to do, we just don’t know, and the counselor made a suggestion. The counselor said here’s what you need to do — stop acting like you had a procedure, and act like you had a death in the family.”

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Different cultures and religions believe in different types of healing practices, there are a lot of Americans that use herbal remedies to cure all sorts of illnesses. If these remedies don’t work, it is the responsibility of the individual and family members to seek out proper medical treatment for the

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1) Regeneration - If faith is produced by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 2:8), then this must be the case of Old Testament saints (Hebrews 11) who looked ahead to the cross, believing that what God had promised in regard to their redemption would come to pass. 2) Indwelling (or filling) - Here is where the major difference between the Spirit’s roles in the Old and New Testaments is apparent. So, while in the New Testament the Spirit only indwells believers and that indwelling is permanent (1 Corinthians 3:16-17; 6:19-20), in contrast to this work in the New Testament, the indwelling in the Old Testament was selective and temporary. The Spirit “came upon” such Old Testament people as Joshua (Numbers 27:18), David (1 Samuel

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