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Summary Of The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down By Anne Fadiman

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In the Novel “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” by Anne Fadiman the doctor and Hmong relationship seems to be improving because the doctors are finally letting the Hmong use traditional healing techniques. However, the only reason the doctors are agreeing to this is because they believe she is going to “die anyway”. In my opinion this is crude and an inhumane way of the doctors to think and then allow the family to follow the traditions. Instead of trying to explain to the family the gravity of the situation through a cultural interpreter or finding an anthropologist is explain issue they ignore it. They ignore it by essentially giving up understanding the family and their perception of the events, allowing them to try their best to save her for her only to die, meanwhile the doctors new of this the whole time. While I understand where the doctors were coming from wanting to appease the family, I still do not …show more content…
The fact that the FDA approved a drug essentially segregating medicine with no solid factual evidence blows my mind. Claiming that this “new” drug only works on African Americans is a bold claim that was only supported to do the sample size being so small and only composed of African Americans. The drug is not a new design or a breakthrough in medicine by any means due to it being two previous developed medicine smashed together and sold for a ridiculously high price. A point made in this article which I found interesting is when the author said, “Most drugs on the market today were tested in overwhelmingly white populations, but we do not call these medicines ‘white’ nor should we”. This quote struck me as powerful because it is true and reading into it once can assume the FDA of segregating medicine by saying African Americans cannot represent the general population, like white people have been for the majority of pharmaceutical testing

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