The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Summary

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Recommended: Define health and illness

1) Sickness is different from disease as sickness refers to a social or cultural concept of a disease/illness while disease is the biological definition of it. An example of an sickness is “Qaug dab peg” a Hmong sickness that occurs when the soul leaves the body resulting in seizures. An example of a disease is epilepsy a neurological condition that causes the body to have random seizures. Both examples are of the same disease, but one is how the culture views it while the other is how biology views it.
Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Print.
2) Medical pluralism was used to treat Lia in Fadiman’s book as she was treated using both Western medicine and Hmong medicine. For example, she was taken to Merced County Hospital by her parents after she began to have seizures to get her looked at by Doctors and while there she was treated using western medication. At the same time though her family also treated her using Hmong medical beliefs which involved sacrificing animals in an attempt to bring her spirit back as well as visiting Twix Neeb, a Hmong shaman, in Michigan in an attempt to get professional help in curing their daughter. …show more content…

One was a biological explanation which was used by Lia’s western doctors as well as the US government. This explanation was based around viewing Lia’s condition as a biological problem with her brain. Lia’s parents on the other hand had a more supernatural explanation for Lia’s condition as they believed it was caused by Lia’s soul being spooked and leaving her body for short periods of time. That and unlike the western doctors they saw it as a mixed blessing as for them it meant that Lia was more attuned to the afterlife and could become a Twix Neeb when she was older, but she still had to deal with issues coming from

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