The Spirit Catches and You Fall Down

So it seems I'm failing at this "post weekly" thing. Hopefully this will be the first step towards remedying that. Anyway, you'll see at the bottom of some posts that say "Backlog: date" in red, indicating when that event actually occurred (and not when I posted it here).

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In undergrad, I took an amazing course called "Anthrcul 344: Medical Anthropology." One of the books we were required to read was The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. It's about an epileptic Hmong girl and the narration of her story from the worldviews of both her parents and her doctors.

In early November 2009, Anne Fadiman came to give a guest lecture at my med school! Of course I had RSVP'd for this like a month in advance - and the auditorium hall was packed! I mean, how could I miss the opportunity to meet the author of a book that captured the beginning of a cultural shift within the medical profession? How could I miss an opportunity to hear what pearls of wisdom I may gain from this lecture, especially as I'm on the Hmong Health Education Program (HHEP) committee here? How could I, as a med student, not sit in on a lecture so relevant to cultural competency to aid me in better caring for a diverse patient population in the future (especially since cultural issues largely aren't discussed at length throughout medical training)?

It was a great lecture. She was more down-to-earth than I had envisioned. She discussed the conflict that could occur between two cultures due to mis-communications. Indeed, there is a medical culture that contains within it almost everything you'd expect of a culture - it has its own hierarchy, it's own rules, it's own language, it's own special clothes, it's own rituals, and it's own worldview. One thing she said that will stick in my mind is the idea of a Venn diagram of patient-physician communication. There is always overlap, however small. Sometimes the patient, sometimes the doctor, often both, must venture to the periphery of their circles into the area where the two circles overlap - to where there is common ground between patient and doctor. This overlap is (apparently) called the "lune," and we must seek it as both patients and doctors to promote maximal outcome.

Afterwards, I had the luck (and patience) to have her sign my book! Okay, I actually left my original copy back home in Michigan. But an M4 (incidentally the M4 who started the HHEP) gave me a free copy of her book for the signing, so now I have 2 books and one of them has her autograph!! She drew that Venn diagram in my book, reminding me to find the lune. I also got to take a picture with her. This must be the first time I was so close to a celebrity, lol!

Me, Anne Fadiman, and Jenny (fellow M1, also a UM alum)

Her work is well-known in medical anthropology and in the medical community. To think that a journalist would have such a profound effect on the way physicians, bioethicists, and anthropologists would view cultural differences within medicine and how those differences impact healthcare - sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.

Backlog: 11-02-09