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What an incredible read! A clash of Western medicine with Hmong culture, exasperated by a lack of translators, cultural understanding, and education on both sides. Anne Fadiman shows how the situation involving one very sick child went wrong and makes suggestions as to more effective ways to communicate and provide care. I really enjoyed learning about the Hmong family in particular, and their own methods of parenting and treating the sick. The author suggests that millenia of Hmong people refus
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What an incredible read. The story is riveting, the Hmong history fascinating, and the writer's process sensitively evoked. I was hyperaware (hypersuspicious?) of potential PC overload but Fadiman managed to educate and illuminate me without indoctrinating. In the tragic story of Lia Lee, 4 year old Hmong child with severe epilepsy, there are no villains, just heaps of misunderstanding and mistrust, with wildly different worldviews and very little common ground. Hmong are from Mars, the biomedic
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Sep 28, 2007
Ching-In
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Jun 09, 2008
Laura
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Krista the Krazy Kataloguer
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