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The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Essay

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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman is a book about the misunderstandings between cultures and the importance of cultural competence. The story focuses on a Hmong refugee family from Laos living in Merced, California when one of it’s younger members, Lia, is diagnosed with epilepsy. The Hmong people believe they are protectors of their own souls and that people afflicted with epilepsy have a sacred ability to travel to the spirit realm to protect their spirit from the dab, or malevolent spirits. Because of this, Hmong epileptics are seen as people to be revered fighting a noble battle. This conflicts with western medicine and created a war between Lia’s doctors and family that kept her from receiving the care she needed. At four years old, Lia developed status epilepticus and hit her head. She went into septic shock in the hospital and suffered brain-death. Her parents chose not to remove her from life support.

The overarching theme of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down was that lack of cultural competence can kill. Fadiman wrote, “I have come to believe that her life was ruined not by septic shock or noncompliant parents but by cross-cultural misunderstanding” (p.262). Lia’s parents almost never followed the doctor’s …show more content…
minorities). This is exemplified in how obstetric nurses working in Merced decided that Hmong women were unintelligent. They came to this conclusion because Hmong women are silent during delivery and never signaled to the nurses that birth was imminent (pg. 74). What they didn’t know was that Hmong women believed screaming during delivery could trigger complications and possibly bring evil spirits to their child. Had the nurses understood this, they would have seen the silence as a Hmong way to protect their children rather than outright

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