The Health Care Providers Didn t Understand The Lees...

The health care providers didn’t understand the Lee’s culture. The doctors never took the time to understand the Hmong culture and instead assumed that their practices may have been what was negatively affecting Lia’s recovery. According to Fadiman (2003), in the hospital they would call the shaman â€Å"witch doctoring† (p. 35). Many times the Lees wouldn’t understand the instructions of the doctors and I believe this also impacted the way that they thought of medicine. The doctors loved Lia and so did her parents, but they just had different ways of thinking. The Lees thought that sickness comes from the soul, and the doctors believed that there was a physiological cause for the sickness. The doctors were not open minded about the Lee’s†¦show more content†¦I think the main point in this story is not to give up, but instead to be patient and have the courage to fight back. According to the Hmong culture a shaman helps to cure the soul. A doctor cures physiological problems. As we learn throughout this class there is a difference between an illness and a disease. An illness or a disease may have the absence of the other. In most cases an illness can be present without a disease. In the case of Lia there was a presence of both illness and disease. If txiv neeb and the American doctor would have balanced their practices and learned from each other, this would have positively affected the way the Lees thought about modern medicine. I believe that faith plays an important role in Lia’s case, and if the doctors would have understood the way that txiv neeb thought and vice versa, the Lees would have trusted American doctors and medicine more. Learning from txiv neeb would have also helped the American doctors in Lia’s case and in other cases when treating Hmong patients by understanding their culture. It is important for the doctors to understa nd the Hmong culture and specifically the way that a txiv neeb works because in Merced a third of the population were Hmong and used a tixv neeb as their main source of healing. A txiv neeb takes the time to be with a patient while a doctor would only spend 15 minutes with them. A txiv neeb could have learn how to perform CPR in case it was ever