Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today about the importance of social anthropology and its importance in the medical community. Many of you as health care providers have had difficult experiences explaining Western medical technology to your Hmong patients. Either the treatment program was not followed appropriately or the parents removed the children from the hospital before treatment began. The Hmong have a very well devolved fight or flight response that has been keenly honed over generations. America is their new home and while they have begun the process of assimilation with changes in religion and language they still strongly believe in the shamanistic rituals for healing. By understanding those rituals and finding ways to integrate them with Western medicine there will be less frustration and more meaningful treatment. To understand the Hmong you need to have at least a brief history of the regions in which they have lived and their long history of migration. Their last migration was their relocation as refugees to the United States. The history of migration began when 2700 and 2300 B.C. when they lived between the planes of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. The multiple conflicts of the region helped to develop the fight or flight response. The Hmong were affected by the Indo-China war. The death toll was largely due in part to the fighting and also the starvation and diseases that were prevalent during the forced migrations with the country. After Laos fell in 1975 thousands of the Hmong fled to Thailand where they lived in refugee camps until they were resettled in various countries including the United States. Their relocation was primarily to urban areas with an increase in technology that was unfamiliar to the Hmong which resulted in further changes in their lifestyle and traditions. When the Hmong immigrated to the United States they had a wide range of ideologies to alter social relationships and to create access to secondary social and economic resources. By becoming Christians and changing some aspects of their medical practice the Hmong gains access to economic resources including literacy and material practices but lost some of their traditional ritual practices. Christianity provided a means for the Hmong to reinforce their cultural identity in their churches while appearing to be absorbed by mainstream society. Another way the Hmong have attempted to assimilate with American culture is by including practices from Western medicine in their lives. The difficulty arises because the Hmong believe that their medical practices are superior for several reasons one of which is they enhance their sense of membership in their own culture. This membership is important to people that have undergone significant change and trauma as refugees. While the Hmong have begun to adapt to Western medicine they have also kept their medical traditions. These two very distinct medical traditions resulted in miscommunication between doctors and the Hmong which can be seen very clearly in the case of Lia Lee. During the treatment of Lia Lee, she was being treated for epilepsy which in the Hmong tradition is known as quag dab peg or the spirit catches you and you fall down the miscommunication between the doctor and parents resulted in the removal of L