cross-cultural health care

“Hey, Uce”

Andrew O. September 10, 2024 5 Comments

I’ll never forget my shadowing experience in the emergency department during my first year of medical school.

Scanning that morning’s list of patients, I saw a last name that made me do a double-take. A distinctly Samoan name: Mr. Fuaga.

My father’s side of the family came to the States from Samoa before I was born, and I grew up curious about Polynesian culture. My father always taught me to seek out fellow Pacific Islanders in whatever path I pursued, no matter how few of us there might be.

A Daughter of Vietnamese Refugees

Clara D.T. Nguyen May 7, 2024 4 Comments

Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”

I am a daughter of Vietnamese refugees.

I wear my identity so proudly that I often reflexively lead with this when, as a medical student, I’m introduced to colleagues, professors and supervisors. It is my response when asked, “How will you contribute to diversity?”

Teachings

Rory O'Sullivan October 13, 2023 9 Comments

“It’s not like what they taught you.”

It is the winter of 2013. I am a second-year family-medicine resident, with big ideas and small experience. Brian is a staff physician, maybe three or four years into practice—years that might as well be decades. The two of us huddle in one corner of the little airport departure lounge in Sioux Lookout, Ontario.

El Jugo Me Hizo Daño

C.A. Rivera February 5, 2021 15 Comments

February 2010:

I toss and turn in bed, trying to fall back asleep; I have only a small cushion of time between getting up and heading to the hospital. I’m a third-year medical student doing my medicine subinternship. I have the choice of going to work or staying in bed a little longer.

On the other side of town, Ms. Garcia doesn’t have much choice about heading to the hospital: She’s bleeding from her nose and rectum. Standing in a puddle of blood, she calls 911.

Mommy Chuy

Amy Engler May 8, 2020 3 Comments

Mrs. Hernandez is a ninety-two-year-old Spanish-speaking woman, originally from Mexico, with high blood pressure and high cholesterol, who arrived in the emergency department of the hospital where I’m a fourth-year medical student.

Her right arm and leg were weak, the right side of her face drooped; her speech was slurred, and she seemed confused. Her CT scans showed that a blood clot had blocked her middle cerebral artery, in the area of the brain that governs language. Mrs. Hernandez was a stroke victim.

Mrs. Hernandez is also my abuela.

Birth of a Midwife

Rebecca Leeman January 3, 2020 12 Comments

As a nurse, I was brand new to labor and delivery–and I was on my third night shift in a row. Walking back from a quick break, I was called over by the charge nurse.

“You have the next admit from triage,” she told me. “She’s a live one–and so is her family. They’re carnies.”

“What’s that?” I asked, bewildered.

“You know, the people who do the circus and carnival circuit–gypsies,” she said, innocently using a term that is now considered derogatory, but was then often applied to the nomadic ethnic group known as Roma. “She’s going natural.”

Eye-Opener

Daniel Lee May 10, 2019 54 Comments

Daniel Lee ~

1. Bipolar disorder
2. History of postpartum psychosis
3. No custody of her children
4. In treatment for cocaine abuse
5. Regular smoker

I digest each of these facts on the computer screen in rapid succession, progressively cementing the picture of Renee Pryce, a twenty-eight-year-old woman in her final months of pregnancy.

I’m a first-year resident in a large urban county hospital. In the course of my training, I’ve learned that some people (mostly older doctors) find the electronic medical record (EMR) burdensome and inefficient.

A Stranger Comes to Town

Syed M. Ahmed January 19, 2018 21 Comments

Syed M. Ahmed ~

Twenty-five years ago, having completed my family-medicine residency, I left Houston to start a two-year stint practicing in a remote village of fewer than 2,000 souls in the Appalachian Mountains of Ohio.

The day I arrived at my new workplace (a two-person practice in the only clinic for fifty miles), my new colleague Dr. Jones told me that she was leaving the next day on a two-week vacation.

Hearing this, I felt anxious, to say the least. I’d expected her to take time off, but so soon? Also, not only were this Appalachian town and its folks completely unknown to me, and vice-versa, but I was the first Asian physician to come to those parts.

Native Ways

Jan Jahner November 24, 2017 7 Comments

Jan Jahner ~

They came up from the center of the earth, The People
where sky speaks to corn,
speaks to cottonwoods, to runoff in the wash.
Living beneath black-slashed canyon walls
home to sheep and weavers.
He is one of them, my patient
one of the ancients; leathery face carved and quiet
she is his daughter, fingers on the covers,
ready should he wake.

He is dying and we can’t say it.
Soft sounds unknown to me, their language of wind, cottonwood and wool
in the center of this circle is knowing and not saying
the medicines continue
but we turn, bathe, suction and weave the fibers close.

Our Town (Chinese Spoken)

Jan Qiu July 11, 2008 No Comments

By the time Mrs. Zhang came to see me, her headache, left-sided weakness and facial numbness were two weeks old. Like many Chinese immigrants in this country, she’d hesitated to seek medical care because of language and cultural barriers and her apprehensiveness about Western medicine. In fact, she hadn’t seen a physician in the ten years since she and her husband had come to America. Only after a friend told her about me, the sole Chinese primary-care physician in a small Pennsylvania town, did she and her husband come to see me.

Mr. and Mrs. Zhang struck me as a typical older Chinese couple. With smiles on their faces, they bowed repeatedly to everyone in my office.

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: cross-cultural health care

“Hey, Uce”

A Daughter of Vietnamese Refugees

Teachings

El Jugo Me Hizo Daño

Mommy Chuy

Birth of a Midwife

Eye-Opener

A Stranger Comes to Town

Native Ways

Our Town (Chinese Spoken)

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: cross-cultural health care

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