Jorge Perez

“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

“El dinero fue creado muchas veces y en muchos lugares. Su desarrollo no requirió grandes descubrimientos tecnológicos: fue una revolución puramente mental. Implicó la creación de una nueva realidad intersubjetiva que solo existe en la imaginación compartida de la gente.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens. De animales a dioses: Una breve historia de la humanidad

“they’d just load him up with opium so he’d fall asleep.” DeLay pointed out that although few refugees are rejected for medical reasons, it is a terrible crisis for the ill person’s family when this does happen, especially because once an applicant is “medically excluded” by one potential country of asylum, he is unlikely to be accepted anywhere else. “All of this means that the refugees have one more reason to be afraid of doctors,” said DeLay.”
― 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