Communication is cited as a contributing factor to 70% of healthcare errors, which has led to many initiatives in healthcare settings to improve the way healthcare professionals communicate. (Kohn, 2000.) As part of my course on Culture, Health, and Illness, I undertook a critical analysis of the book "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the collision of two cultures. by Anne Fadiman. This book was published in 1997 and documents a Hmong family from Laos' struggle to communicate and understand the American healthcare system. The Vietnam War caused great destruction in Laos and so the Lee family emigrated to America, after spending a short time there. in refugee camps in Thailand. After settling in America, Foua gives birth to Lia, who, unbeknownst to them, will suffer from epilepsy shortly after her birth. Over the past four years, little Lia has been hospitalized seventeen times, following major and minor attacks. Through poor communication and a failure to understand each other's cultural differences, Lia's parents and her American doctors are ultimately responsible for Lia's tragic fate, when she ends up in a vegetative state. In this critical analysis, I hope to show that the lack of communication and compromise between the Hmong family and American doctors was the major blow to Lia's poor health. I hope to accomplish this by addressing the following three main points of interest in relation to this communication problem: The views of the American health professions on the causes of Lia's illness contrasted with those of Lia's parents. I will then discuss Lia's parents' health-seeking strategies and how they were influenced by different resources...... middle of paper ...... Lia Lee will never be repeated. "The soul caller in Lia's healing ceremony, began chanting: 'Where are you? Where have you been? . . . Go home. Go home to your mother. . . Go home.' Go home. Go home." Ironically and tragically, Lia would never return home, as her brain had been lost forever. References: Balzer Riley, J. 2012. Communication in Nursing. 7th ed. United States: ElsevierFadiman, A. 1997. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kleinman, A. 1980. Patients and healers in the context of culture: an exploration of the boundary between anthropology, medicine and psychiatry. University of California Press. Kohn, L. et al. 2000. To err is human: building a safer health system. Washington DC National Academies Press.