Hmong American Concepts of Health, Healing, and Conventional Medicine

Dia Cha examines how Hmong Americans understand health, illness, and healing, and what happens when those understandings meet conventional American medicine, identifying specifically what obstructs care and what enables it. That practical framing is the difference between this and a general cultural account: it is written to be used by people making clinical decisions. Cha is a Hmong American anthropologist, and the book answers from inside the community the questions that The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down raises from outside it. Anyone who read Fadiman and wanted the other half should read this. For clinicians, medical educators, social workers, and students of medical anthropology.