Book Review

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures

N Engl J Med 1998; 339:354July 30, 1998

Article

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures
By Anne Fadiman. 339 pp. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. $24. ISBN: 0-374-26781-2

In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman tells the story of a Hmong family's experience with the American health care system and highlights many of the weaknesses of what some describe as the best health care system in the world. Fadiman writes beautifully and weaves the story of the Lees, their doctors, and the social and political history of the Hmong people and their unwilling immigration to the United States into a book that is difficult to put down once started. The Spirit Catches You will appeal to anyone interested in the culture of medicine and the interface between different cultures. It will also attract readers interested in the dynamics of power in the doctor–patient relationship and readers who can find inspiration in one family's devotion to a chronically ill child.

Nao Kao and Foua Lee and their children came to the United States because they felt they had no other option. They could not return to their home in Laos because there they faced persecution, yet they had to leave their refugee camp in Thailand because it had been scheduled to close. They settled in a Hmong community in California, where their daughter Lia was born. The treatment of Lia's seizure disorder in the United States, both by her parents and by her health care providers, is the theme of this story. Fadiman takes the reader through the details of the treatment to paint a full picture of Lia's experience as a chronically ill Hmong child in America.

We learn, for example, that long before the Lees even considered coming to the United States they had heard rumors about American doctors: doctors casually take blood from people, including children (the Hmong believe that the body contains a finite amount of blood that is not replaceable); doctors remove organs from their patients to eat or sell for food; doctors anesthetize patients and in so doing put their patients' souls at large, leading to illness or death; and when Hmong are admitted to the hospital, doctors cut the “spirit-strings” from their wrists, thus disturbing their “life-souls.” American doctors, in turn, often consider the Hmong to be ignorant, backward, and too reliant on animal sacrifices and other unacceptable practices. During Lia's treatment, the assumptions and beliefs that both parties brought to the patient–doctor interaction were never adequately explored. Doctors often took advantage of their powerful position, and along the way there was a lack of trust and respect between the family and the doctors. Much of Fadiman's book explores how each party blamed the other for the tragic outcome — Lia's severe mental and physical disabilities.

In one of the book's final chapters, Fadiman suggests ways in which health care providers can improve their ability to care for patients whose background is different from their own. The chapter draws heavily on work by Arthur Kleinman and others who began exploring cross-cultural medicine before it became popular. Readers of Fadiman's book will understand, however, that to provide high-quality, appropriate care for the diverse populations using the U.S. health care system, health care providers and organizations must adequately assess the need for resources to address a wide range of cross-cultural issues. Holding a “diversity” or “multicultural” day in a hospital or medical school is a superficial and inadequate approach. More meaningful is participation by bilingual, bicultural, professionally trained interpreters, the lack of which played a major part in the miscommunication between the Lees and their physicians. Americans' lack of understanding of the hierarchy in the Hmong community and of how conflicts are resolved was also a major barrier that might have been addressed by a health worker representing the Hmong community. The Spirit Catches You illustrates how much time, energy, and commitment are necessary to understand another culture's perspective on health and wellness and to translate that understanding into the day-to-day practice of medicine.

JudyAnn Bigby, M.D.
Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA 02115