Paper 1 Reflection Paper Reflection Paper 2 Overall Impression of Book: I feel that Anne Fadiman narrated the story of Lia Lee’s and her family’s life in intimate and tragic detail. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a poignant depiction of the struggle between loving parents, hard-working medical professionals, and a very precious child caught in the middle of a tug-of-war. Ms. Fadiman very distinctly illustrates how the collision of two cultures
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Literary Reviews Laura Miller of Salon write, “Indelible . . . Much like Ann Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, this is a heroic work of cultural and medical journalism. With it, Skloot reminds doctors, patients, and outside observers that however advanced the technology and esoteric the science, the material they work with is humanity, and every piece of it is precious.” In Miller’s review of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” she focuses almost solely on the aspect of Henrietta’s
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be, they are not often black and white and at times require that we take our time to really examine our choices and how we come to reach them. Although there are many ethical dilemmas within the content of the story and some may be very hard to pin down, finding just one specific health care ethical issue to talk about can be considered a daunting task. First we must understand that the word ethics means different things to different people and that in reality its very definition can describe their
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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down Book Review by Jerry Cyccone The book I chose to review, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Huong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures”, by Anne Fadiman, is a non-fiction narrative about the collision of cultural relativism and medicine. The book describes the struggles faced by the Lees, a Hmong family that emigrated from Laos in 1980, to the city of Merced, California. The story revolves around young Lia Lee
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The Spirit Catches You and Fall Down discusses many important topics, such as cultural humility and the consequences of miscommunication. The following is a brief response to some of the key topics discussed in the book (Fadiman, 1997). Explanatory Model of Illness: Definition of the Explanatory Model of Illness: An explanatory model of illness is a model that focuses on how the patient understands his or her illness and the factors that are involved. Two Examples of the Explanatory Model of Illness
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In the Novel “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” by Anne Fadiman the doctor and Hmong relationship seems to be improving because the doctors are finally letting the Hmong use traditional healing techniques. However, the only reason the doctors are agreeing to this is because they believe she is going to “die anyway”. In my opinion this is crude and an inhumane way of the doctors to think and then allow the family to follow the traditions. Instead of trying to explain to the family the gravity
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The book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall down, by Anne Fadiman, shines light on the flaws in the healthcare system. Fadiman in her book humanizes the experiences of a Hmong refugee family, the Lees, and their interactions with the health care system in Merced, California. The book mainly focuses on the health care of Lia Lee, one of the youngest daughters. She is diagnosed with epilepsy, nonetheless, that diagnoses went against her family’s cultural beliefs. In her culture, they believed her
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old her sister slammed a door and Lia had her first seizure. Her parents believed that the noise of the door had caused her soul to flee. The author states, “They recognized the resulting symptoms as quag dab peg, which means, “The spirit catches you and you fall down.” (pg. 20) They were concerned but also proud that she could be a shaman which are often Hmong epileptics that have emotional credibility as healers. (pg. 21) They took her to Merced Community Medical Center (MCMC) for medical treatment
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person’s soul travelling between realms, while western medicine associates these symptoms with abnormal electrical activity in the brain. The Hmong culture sees this condition as an honor and indication that the person is called to host a healing spirit and become a shaman. The US medical system views epilepsy as an impairment. Neither the social construction of this illness nor cultural implications in Hmong and Western medicine were understood by the Lee family and the doctors treating Lia at MCMC
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ANALYZING ‘THE LAST LEAF’ Author: O’Henry He is known for startling his readers with surprise endings. A surprise ending is an unexpected twist at the end of a story that you did not predict. Even though an ending is a surprise, it must be believable.Writers make surprise endings believable by giving you a few hints about the ending without giving it away Title: The title suggests a tree with only one leaf on it. It implies that the most important thing about the story is the leaf. After reading
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