The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down Summary

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The Spirit Catches you and you Fall Down is the story of an epileptic Hmong girl, Lia Lee, and her families experience with her American doctors and the Western healthcare system. The story illustrates the cultural collision of the Hmong society and the American healthcare system, and how challenging understanding and treatment was for both the doctors and the Lee family. The clash of these vastly different cultures resulted in frustration, anger, miscommunication, and misunderstandings that ultimately had a negative impact on the medical care of Lia Lee. It is difficult to read this story twenty plus years later and see the lack of family-centered care, cultural sensitivity, and rapport building provided by the American doctors working with Lia. It is also …show more content…
However, there were many things that went wrong in Lia’s medical situation that hopefully does not happen as much in today’s healthcare system. With a better understanding of cultural diversity, appropriate referrals, language translators, and child life specialists (CLS) I am hopeful that the situation with Lia Lee’s family would not happen present day. In this reflection essay, I will briefly summarize the text, integrate content from child life courses, explain the impacts of this story on my future career as a CLS, discuss possible outcomes if there had been more respect of the Hmong culture, and reflect on the importance of this text for future healthcare staff. As stated above, The Spirit Catches you and you Fall down is the story of Lia Lee and the lack of culturally sensitive communication and care provided to the Lee family in the Western healthcare system. When Lia was an infant she had her first seizure following her sister slamming a door. Lia’s parents, Foua and Nao Kao’s cultural background lead them to believe the loud noise caused Lia’s soul to flee her body and diagnosed her with “quag dab peg.” The title of the book is
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