Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Reflection

Summer Reading Reflection Medical ethics are as complicated as medical school itself, if not more so. In medical school, one is at least told what is right and what is wrong. These black and white pleasantries do not translate to the grey, intricate “correctness” of medical ethics. Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, follows the story of a young Hmong girl named Lia Lee, her family, her doctors, and almost a decade of ethical dilemmas. The Hmong shamanistic medical traditions are extremely different to the American healthcare system. The Lee family has recently emigrated from Laos and speaks Hmong and cannot communicate their wishes with the doctors and nurses. Because of this cultural divide, the medical staff and Lia’s family have many different altercations over the course of Lia’s numerous visits to the MCM. This rare circumstance raises a question: what care should Lia receive, the American treatment or the Hmong treatment? After several cases of noncompliance from the Lees, the doctors start to take matters more into their own hands. Lia’s doctors did not take her family’s input into account because …show more content…
They didn’t take her family’s cultures or wishes into account. They explained enough to get Foua to write FOUAYANG on the consent form, and then went on with the procedure. Neil shouldn’t have had the right to tear Lia from Foua’s Hmong household and send her to an American foster family. Although there were many other procedures performed on Lia throughout her years suffering from epilepsy, the spinal tap at the VCH was the worst because the doctors in the area knew that the Hmong disagreed with it. After all this review, the crux of Lia’s tragedy boils down to one key issue: the fact that her doctors only attempted to make the Lees understand them, and never tried to understand the