Title: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
First published: 1997
Description: When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos.

Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness and healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually everything in the universe, while the medical community marks a division between body and soul, and concerns itself almost exclusively with the former.

Lia's doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness qaug dab peg - the spirit catches you and you fall down - and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her parents preferred animal sacrifices.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down moves from hospital corridors to healing ceremonies, and from the hill country of Laos to the living rooms of Merced, uncovering in its path the complex sources and implications of two dramatically clashing worldviews.
Subjects: Asian Americans, Attitude, Attitude of Health Personnel, Child, Communication, Complementary Therapies, Cross-Cultural Comparison, Cultural Diversity, Disease, Emigration and immigration, Epilepsy, Family Relations, Hmong, Home care services, Hospitals, Infant, Labor, Obstetric, Medicine, Traditional, Merced Community Medical Center (CA), Nurses, Obstetric Labor, Parent-Child Relations, Patient Care, Patient compliance, Persistent Vegetative State, Physicians, Professional-Family Relations, Professional-Patient Relations, Religion, Social Work, Social values, Traditional medicine, Treatment Refusal, Vietnam Conflict, Transcultural medical care, Hmong (asian people), united states, Intercultural communication, Hmong Americans, Epilepsy in children, Medical care, Case studies, Medicine, Hmong American children, New York Times reviewed, Cultural, Disease & health issues, Social sciences -> anthropology -> cultural anthropology, Social sciences -> sociology -> sociology of health, Fiction, psychological, Man-woman relationships, fiction, New york (n.y.), fiction, Authors, fiction, Reading Level-Grade 7, Reading Level-Grade 9, Reading Level-Grade 8, Reading Level-Grade 11, Reading Level-Grade 10, Reading Level-Grade 12, Case Reports, Geneeskunde, Kulturkonflikt, Volksgeneeskunde, Ärztliche Behandlung, nyt:religion-spirituality-and-faith=2014-09-07, New York Times bestseller
Places: California, Laos, United States
People: Lia Lee
LC classification: RA418.5.T73 F33 1997