Jorge Perez

“Most old people prefer not to go to doctor. They feel, maybe doctor just want to study me, not help my problems. They scary this. If they go one time, if they not follow appointment and do like doctor want, doctor get mad. Doctor is like earth and sky. He think, you are refugee, you know nothing.”
― Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

“Incluso fui vegetariano estricto durante un tiempo y, moralmente hablando, debería seguir siéndolo: es la única posición moral coherente con respecto a los animales. Sin embargo, aunque no soy tan malo como podría ser, tampoco soy tan bueno como debería.”
― Mark Rowlands, El filósofo y el lobo (Biblioteca Abierta)

“There were hundreds of pages whose proper home I was at a loss to determine. Should they go in the Medicine folder? The Mental Health folder? The Animism folder? The Shamanism folder? The Social Structure folder? The Body/Mind/Soul Continuum folder? I hovered uncertainly, pages in hand, and realized that I was suspended in a large bowl of Fish Soup. Medicine was religion. Religion was society. Society was medicine. Even economics were mixed up in there somewhere (you had to have or borrow enough money to buy a pig, or even a cow, in case someone got sick and a sacrifice was required), and so was music (if you didn’t have a qeej player at your funeral, your soul wouldn’t be guided on its posthumous travels, and it couldn’t be reborn, and it might make your relatives sick).”
― Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

“When I asked Dan Murphy why he thought caring for the Hmong caused so much stress, he said, “People in the early years of their medical careers have invested an incredible amount of time and energy and pain in their training, and they have been taught that what they’ve learned in medical school is the only legitimate way to approach health problems. I think that is why some young doctors go through the roof when Hmong patients reject what we have to offer them, because it intimates that what Western medicine has to offer is not much.”
― Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures