The book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman is a journey through the experiences of a young girl who suffers from epilepsy named Lia Lee. This book follows the Lee family and the hospitals journey and navigation through Lia’s medical needs. The main point of this reading is to show how Western medical care is not universal to all cultures and not being prepared, educated, or aware of this fact can create major issues for the health of an individual in need of medical care. Trying to give Western medical treatment to ethnic groups that come from very different cultures and medical techniques can be insanely difficult. In this book, the Lee family are unfamiliar and untrusting of the Western doctors from the very beginning. The inability to communicate to the doctors mixed with their faith in their traditional way of healing complicated the treatment for their daughter. The deeper you get into the book Lia’s seizures worsen, and so does the communication and trust between her doctors and her family. However, the Lee family’s case is extreme but this failure to successfully understand a culture and communicate to the patient and family are not uncommon in hospitals. This story helped me understand and learn how confusing this process can be for both the cultural and medical perspectives. From an outsiders point of view it is easy to think that this is an easy fix. From an outsider and Western perspective, if the Lee family would have just given their trust and listened to the doctors then the problem would be fixed. However, if you consider the story from the otherside- How would they be able to trust the doctors when they have had no past experience with how western medicine works? How could they when they have no way to fully communicate and understand the doctors? Questions like these need to be considered regularly in hospitals when dealing with other cultures, languages, and traditions in order to provide the best care possible. It is necessary for hospitals to be familiar with the journey of Lia Lee and the doctors that treated her in order to be more aware of cultural diversity when giving Western medicine. However, this is much easier said than done.
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AuthorThe students in Spring 2019 Medical Anthropology! ArchivesCategories |