The huge collision occurs when one considers the huge amounts of medicine being administered to Lia from her parents' perspective. The chapter begins by narrating Lia's medical crisis and the steps the doctors took to counteract it. It is only later in the chapter that a full laundry list of all the medicines given to Lia over this time is provided, as well as the medical necessity for each one. And it is also at this point that Fadiman quotes Nao Kao as saying "[Lia] got very sick and I think it is because they gave her too much medicine"(148). "American medicine" was doing its best to deal with the medical puzzle of a patient, and meanwhile, the parents of the young girl believed these care-givers not to be healing, but destroying.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Reactions to Chapter 11, "The Big One"
As I have been reading this book, I have become more and more shocked over the collisions of cultures depicted in Fadiman's book. This is not a new thought; all of our discussion has circled around this, and the "collision of two cultures" is part of the book's title. However, there are certain moments in the book that really cause an alternating sense of shock and confusion, and I find myself asking "how could the doctors act like this?" and "how could the doctors have done anything else?" The most shocking of these moments for me is when Lia is admitted to the ICU at Valley's Children's Hospital in a terrible condition and Dr. Kopacz worked on her for hours without even noticing her sex. This oversight is not the result of neglect on the part of the doctor. We have discussed this lack of individual care by doctors quite a bit in class. Rather, it seems to me that this was caused by the incredible amount of work required by Lia's ailing body over the many hours Dr. Kopacz worked on her: one organ failing after the other. As Fadiman so aptly puts it: "here was American medicine at its worst and its best: the patient was reduced from a girl to an analyzable collection of symptoms, and the physician, thereby able to husband his energies, succeeded in keeping her alive" (147).
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I completely agree with you that the administration of too much medicine was a failure on the part of the American doctors. Had they understood the Hmong culture, they would have known that there was no way such a strict and complicated medication system would work for their family. Furthermore, side-effects of drugs could not be explained - the Lees expected drugs to make Lia better only. Later in the book this is discussed and it is found that over-medication was in fact a contributor to making Lia's problems worse, and it is definitely a shame that this cultural misunderstanding had such disastrous implications.
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