The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down 1. Discuss your overall impression of the book. In the book, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”, a Hmong family’s struggles to maintain its tradition and culture, clashes with the American Health care system when one of their daughter’s, Lia Lee, fell very ill. The book presented to the reader the different ways an illness is perceived and treated in the Hmong culture and in the process unearthed the American Health care system’s inability to associate the disease process to the person as a whole. Whilst there was constant tug of war between the Hmong family and the American doctors with regards to Lia Lee’s treatment plan, both parties interest was only to get the afflicted the best care possible and would want her to survive.
Physician assisted suicide is something I disagree with because It would violate the trust between a patient and a doctor, It opens the floodgates for other such abuses and generally such requests are made out of fear for the dying process. Historically, the fundamental goal of the doctor-patient relationship has been to comfort and to
In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, it is evident that the Hmong people, through their culture, deem the human body and its purposes very different from Western cultures. However, most importantly, the Hmong recognize the application of modern medical treatment to be vastly diverse from their own. Understanding, or at least cognizant, of these differences has an impact on how prosperous medical treatment will be. The biggest difference, resides in the Hmong’s daily lifestyle practices which contain many spiritual and physical connections. By offering two very specific examples, the book utilizes Nao Kao and Foua Lee to exemplify these differences.
Patients and families paying funds and receiving kidneys: While a person could understand they are looking out for their self-interest, when it comes to moral responsibility, the concern for another human being and the reason for their execution should weigh heavy on their minds and in their hearts. As such, the patients and their families are failing their moral responsibility as they not concerning themselves with the act involved in how they received this kidney. When speaking of a stakeholder’s moral failings, all parties involved have failed in this aspect. All the interested parties in this matter chose to ignore their moral responsibilities to another human life. Instead, they chose either their greed or chose to ignore what was occurring so that they could receive that kidney.
Many people are against medically assisted suicide because they feel it goes against a doctor’s code of ethics but not allowing a patient to have options is unfair to them; let them decide what they want for themselves. Why would someone want to continue living if they know that they only had a few months to live? Someone has a terminal illness like cancer; the patient is restricted from doing what they love most in their daily lives, the chemotherapy treatments are not working for
Its principles are held sacred by doctors, “Treat the sick to the best of one's ability, preserve patient privacy, and teach the secrets of medicine to the next generation” (Hippocratic Oath, n.d.). A section of the oath is a frequent reminder in the medical field to keep physician assisted suicide illegal, “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect” (Weir, 1997). This section was created in the 4th or 5th century by the Greeks, when poisoning patients to assist them in dying was
Doctors who lack proper training or those who have impairment problems tend to believe that their patients are honest about issues concerning prescriptions. These may include certain issues such as losing prescriptions, or early refills. This, however, only happens when the doctor fails to identify a drug abuse problem in the patient. Another ethical dilemma in the same field occurs when doctors do not disclose full patient history in the medical file of the patient. This may cause other doctors to prescribe the wrong drug thus putting the life of the patient at risk, either due to possible
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down The barrier of communication that results from cultural collusion is one of the most commonly-seen obstructions in providing timely and appropriate medical care for the patients. The cost is doubtless immense not only to the health of the patients themselves but also to the professional ethics of the hospital staff involved if delay or mistreatment occurs due to cultural difference. Therefore, it becomes extremely important to understand the difference between cultures so as to ensure quality medical treatments to all patients and ,in some extreme cases, prevent treatable illnesses from becoming life-threatening ones. The book" The Spirit Catches You and You Fall down " vividly illustrates the difficulties, brought about by cross-cultural misunderstanding, in providing medical treatment to a child from Laos, Lia, who is diagnosed with epilepsy, who, unfortunately, belongs to a religion that asserts epileptic attacks are perceived as evidence of the epileptic's ability to enter and journey momentarily into the spirit realm------hence the title "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down". In chapter 3 of the book, it reveals that Lia began having epileptic seizures when she was about 3 months old.
The doctors can't accurate diagnose or understand what or why a patient is feeling a certain way, so the corrupt medical establishment gives them this nonsense to spew. These side effects are primarily phase 1 but are a constant problem across the board. Notice the root word of fibromyalgia is fib[e]r, it's not a coincidence. This Family Guy clip indirectly references
The Bio-medical model has several assumptions that are accurate; it defines health as a biological normality it also believes that illnesses and disease are caused by an identifiable factor such as a faulty gene or virus. The model believes that illness is a temporary condition producing a physical symptom and that it should be identified and classified by a medical official not a non-expert. It is common for the experts that follow the bio-medical model to focus solely on diagnosing the symptoms of their patient leaving no room for dispute between the doctor and the patient. Illness and disease has cures and treatments usually from removing the cause, medicine is seen as the way to solve health problems, and the health of society is seen as dependant on the state of medical knowledge and the availability of medical resources. The main strengths of the bio-medical model is that it stresses the importance of trying to find the cause of illness and disease; there is a wealth of evidence that support the bio-medical approach, including successful operations, cancer screenings and immunisation programmes.