The Spirit Catches You is a well-known and adored book both among readers and critics; it won the National Book Critics Circle Award and continues to receive glowing praises. It tells the story of a Hmong refugee family from Laos and describes their struggles as well as interactions with the health care system (Fadiman, 2007). In the story, a girl Lia Lee has a severe form of epilepsy and struggles from culture conflict that complicates and obstructs her treatment (Fadiman, 2007).
Taylor (2003) is one of the book admirers who says that the tragic story of a poor girl and the consequences of the cultural clash “catch you and you fall down” (p. 160). Taylor (2003) believes that the problem of anthropological monographs is that they are usually too complicated and do not catch the reader, but The Spirit Catches You is rather an exception. It both gives the pleasure of reading and food for thought; now the book is “required reading for all first-year medical students at the University of Minnesota, Virginia,” and others (Taylor, 2003, p. 162). For health care providers, cultural competence is the ability to understand cultural traditions and background of their patients and efficiently use the information in the treatment process (Singer & Baer, 2011). The book has “become a canonical text for burgeoning efforts to impart “cultural competence” to health care practitioners (Taylor, 2003, p. 159). Acknowledging the realities of the patients is an essential component of effective anthropological treatment, that is why cultural competence is critical in contemporary medicine.
References
Fadiman, A. (2007). The spirit catches you and you fall down. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Singer, M. & Baer, H. A. (2011). Introducing medical anthropology: A discipline in action (2nd ed.). Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Taylor, J. S. (2003). The story catches you and you fall down: Tragedy, ethnography, and “cultural competence.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 17(2), 159-181.