Summary: A Clash Of Culture

Great Essays
A Clash of Cultures
American practice is to isolate medicine as its own trade, while Hmong practice is to accept that medicine is intertwined with all aspects of life. This cultural base is what fostered miscommunication between the Lees and the American medical system, and is what caused both sides of Lia’s medical care to be wildly contradictory. Neither the Lees nor Lia’s doctors budged on what they deemed to be correct medical practice, and misunderstandings between the two sides are what caused Lia’s medical care to be so tumultuous. Hmong believed that every aspect of the body is intertwined, and that the soul is the most integral part of life. Therefore, the source of most illness has to do with the soul, specifically soul loss. Hmong took a holistic view on everything, while American medical workers broke the body down into segments that need to be fixed. For example, Dan Murphy explained how he could not talk about diabetes as a pancreatic problem. “Most of them had no concept that the organs they saw in animals were the same as in humans, because they didn’t open people up when they died, they buried them intact” (69). These differences in basic conceptual outlooks completely shaped the way that Lia’s epilepsy was viewed between the two parties. To the Lees, “sometimes their thinking
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Americans believed that every ailment has a beginning that is biological, and were willing to use invasive procedures to discover and cure such ailments. However, txiv neebs, Hmong shamans, did not even need to undress their patients, and believed that the soul needs to be treated along with the body (33). What Americans viewed as Hmong refusal of “the basic tools of modern medicine as self-defeating ignorance” (61), Hmong viewed said methods as harmful to the next life (33). It was cultural misunderstandings like these that led to the greatest

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