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The changes of Hmong culture
The changes of Hmong culture
The changes of Hmong culture
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Lee Lor was a fifteen year old Hmong girl. She was diagnosed with an acute appendicitis. During the operation to remove her appendix, doctors discovered an eight inch cancerous tumor in abdomen. Without consent they removed the tumor which cost Lee an ovary and part of fallopian tube. The doctors told her parents after the procedure what had happened and promised that she was still fertile and able to still have children. The Hmong people do not accept the western world tradition and science. They hold on strongly to their ancient traditions, are animist, and very spiritual. When the parents were made aware of the extra procedure taken place they did not trust the doctors and refused Lee further treatment including chemotherapy. This case
Learning from what Dr. Anna Pou had to face with the lawsuits she was dealing with makes me cringe. As Healthcare professionals, having to worry of possibly being sued for believing what is right for the patient or as a whole for the hospitals health is ridiculous. Healthcare professionals like Dr. Pou, have taken the Hippocratic oath, and one of the promises made within that oath is “first, do no harm”. Often time’s society look at courts cases as a battle versus two oppositions, but Dr. Pou’s case it is not. In her statements from national television she states saying her role was to ‘‘help’’ patients ‘‘through their pain,’’.
To conclude, with the Lees being Hmong and not wanting to conform to society and abide by the way things works, I feel Lia’s fate was inevitable. The doctors did as much as they could, but in the end, it still wasn’t enough to prevent Lia from going brain dead. Language and communication may have been the one thing that caused Lia to suffer because the doctors couldn’t understand the Hmong and the Hmong couldn’t or refused to understand the doctors.
In the book The Spirit Catches you and you Fall Down, ethnocentrism can also be seen. Throughout the book the family and the doctors have different ideas of medicine/healing techniques are often disagreed on. It’s important for the doctor to see that biomedicine has its own intentions of saving patient through standard procedures and beliefs. Understanding those terms will shed some light on the culture of the patient, which has their own intentions, beliefs, and rules as well. Breaking down ethnocentrism to find an agreement is a good goal to accomplish in order have successful prognosis and healing. In addition, shedding the ethnocentrism will allow the doctors to see the different cultural beliefs and not judge right away. Although, some cultural remedies may not always work, it’s wrong for people to have the mindset of ethnocentrism without even considering their beliefs first.
Traditional Hmong’s believe in their Shaman rather than western doctors, they choose to detain their treatment by hosting their rituals to save them. A shaman is “a person who acts as intermediary between the natural and supernatural worlds, using magic to cure illness, foretell the future, control spiritual forces, etc” (dictionary.com). Hmong individual’s have a belief that ancestral spirits, including the spirits of shamans, are reincarnated into the same family tree. Hmong consider being a shaman an honor because they carry the duty of helping mankind according to Hmong mythology. Differences between Hmong traditional beliefs and Western biomedical beliefs create a lack of understanding. Negative health care experiences result in Hmong community members’ mistrust and fear of Western medicine. However, when there’s mistrust between a doctor and a patient there could be lack of treatment because of the differences between our ...
Within this critical analysis, I hope to show that the lack of communication and compromise between the Hmong family and the American doctors, was the defining blow to Lia’s ill health. I hope to do this by addressing the following three main points of interest in relation to this miscommunication; the views held by the American healthcare professions on the causes of Lia’s illness, contrasted with the opinions of Lia’s parents. I will then discuss the health-seeking strategies of Lia’s parents and how they were influenced by different resou...
This book addresses one of the common characteristics, and challenges, of health care today: the need to achieve a working knowledge of as many cultures as possible in health care. The Hmong population of Merced, California addresses the collision between Western medicine and holistic healing traditions of the Hmong immigrants, which plays out a common dilemma in western medical centers: the need to integrate modern western medicinal remedies with aspects of cultural that are good for the well-being of the patient, and the belief of the patient’s ability to recuperate. What we see is a clash, or lack of integration in the example of the story thereof. Lia, a Hmong child with a rare form of epilepsy, must enter the western hospital instead of the Laotian forest. In the forest she would seek out herbs to remedy the problems that beset her, but in the west she is forced to enter the western medical hospital without access to those remedies, which provided not only physical but spiritual comfort to those members of the Hmong culture. The herbs that are supposed to fix her spirit in the forest are not available in the western hospital. The Merced County hospital system clashes with Hmong animist traditions.
Henrietta Lacks was born on August 18, 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia. She stayed with her grandfather who also took care of her other cousins, one in particular whose name is David (Day) Lacks. As Henrietta grew up, she lived with both her Grandpa Tommy and Day and worked on his farm. Considering how Henrietta and Day were together from their childhood, it was no surprise that they started having kids and soon enough got married. As the years continued, Henrietta noticed that she kept feeling like there was a lump in her womb/cervix and discovered that there was a lump in her cervix. Soon enough, Henrietta went to Johns Hopkins Medical Center to get this check and learned that she had cervical cancer. But here is where the problem arises, Henrietta gave full consent for her cancer treatment at Hopkins, but she never gave consent for the extraction and use of her cells. During her first treatment TeLinde, the doctor treating Henrietta, removed 2 sample tissues: one from her tumor and one from healthy cervical tissue, and then proceeded to treat Henrietta, all the while no one knowing that Hopkins had obtained tissue samples from Henrietta without her consent. These samples were later handed to ...
In expansion to these convictions, Hmong likewise have numerous traditions and folks that are negotiated by those of the American standard and therapeutic groups; for instance, some Hmong customarily perform custom creature sacrifice and in view of extremely particular entombment customs and the alarm of every human's numerous souls potentially getting away from, the accepted Hmong convictions don't consider anybody experiencing obtrusive restorative surgery. Hmong medicinal framework is dependent ...
The book I read to examine multicultural issues and cultural biases was The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Faldiman. I found it helpful to use Google maps to get a visual of the location Hmong refugees came from in Laos and mentally trace their journey across the Pacific to settle in Merced, CA. There are two main cultures discussed in this book which includes the subordinate Hmong Lee family and the dominant White American doctors who tried to help Lia with her medical or spirit issues depending on which culture you asked. Faldiman stated in the preface, “I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where the edges meet.” This statement would hold so much relevance because Lia’s treatments could have been less stressful if the two cultures reached a point of intersectionality. This is also congruent with what Tatum mentioned in Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria concerning, “Changes in immigration policy in 1965 dramatically increased Asian immigration, significantly altering the demographic makeup of the Asian Pacific American community.” In order to have a full
The Hmong people, an Asian ethnic group from the mountainous regions of China, Vietnam and Laos, greatly value their culture and traditions. The film “The Split Horn: Life of a Hmong Shaman in America” documents the seventeen year journey of the Hmong Shaman, Paja Thao and his family from the mountains of Laos to the heartland of America. This film shows the struggle of Paja Thao to maintain their 5000 year-old shamanic traditions as his children embrace the American culture. Moreover, the film shows that one of the major problems refugees like Paja Thao and his family face upon their arrival to the United States is conflict with the American medical system. Despite the dominant biomedical model of health, the film “The Split Horn” shows that
To understand the events and clashes between Lia’s family and her medical staff, it is necessary to understand who the Hmong are. Fadiman dedicates several chapters of her book to explaining the depths of the Hmong culture in order to strengthen her reader’s understanding of the unfolding dilemma between the Lees and the American doctors. In the terms of Dr. Gary Weaver, a professor and Executive Director of the Intercultural Management Institute at American University, the Hmong are categorized as more high-context and gemeinschaft culture (Weaver 15). A concrete instance of the beliefs of the Hmong is their interpretation of illness. Sukey Waller, a psychiatrist at the Merced Community Outreach Services stated, “Psychological problems do not exist for the Hmongs, because they do not distinguish between mental and physical illness. Everything is a spiritual problem,” (qtd. in...
The Hmong culture is firmly rooted in their spiritual belief of animism, ancestral worship and reincarnation. These beliefs connect them to their sense of health and well-being. They view illness as having either a natural or a spiritual cause. A spiritual cause results in a “loss of souls” or is an action or misdeed that may have offended an ancestor’s spirit (California Department of Health Services, 2004, Purnell, 2013, p. 317). The soul escapes the body and may not be able to find its way back home. The Hmong also believe that a combination of natural and supernatural cause’s results in illness, and spells or curses, violation of taboos, accidents, fright, and infectious disease are other causes for illness (Centers for Disease Control
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman is a nonfiction book that brings to light the clash of Hmong culture and Western medicine in Merced, California. Anne Fadiman tells the story of a Hmong immigrant family, the Lees, and the unfortunate condition of epilepsy that their daughter Lia suffers from. Throughout the book the reader sees great conflict inflicted on medical practitioners due to the Lee’s own cultural beliefs and the frustration suffered by the family due to miscommunication. Anne develops the story by giving a detailed background of the Hmong peoples’ lifestyle in their indigenous land of Lao, how it contributes to their beliefs, and their struggle to understand and accept Western practices.
The cultural barrier between the Lee’s and the doctors was result of their negatives assumptions about each other. Both parties believed that their own treatment was the best way to help Lia deal with her epilepsy. As a result of their inability to look past their own perspectives and remain in their own spheres they moved further away towards a mutual understanding. It is usually harder to trust someone when you already have negative assumptions about them, making the trusting each other near to impossible. If the doctors and parents look passed these assumptions and looked at the situation through an untainted perspective then they would have had better chances of having respect for each other in the beginning.
Lia lee, a little Hmong girl, has a severe case of epilepsy. She is the daughter of Nao Kao and Foua lee who are among the many Hmong refugees that fled to the U.S. The Hmongs are very simple and proud people. They take pride in the fact that they have never been ruled by anyone. Even though they have been driven away and separated many times they always seem to find themselves and their culture, never seemingly adapting to the major culture. Even when French missionaries settled in their area and brought their western ideals, medicine, religion, and values they never really accepted them. Fadiman stated in her book that in reality, “no Hmong is ever fully converted” (35).