Communication is cited as a contributing factor in 70% of healthcare errors, leading to many initiatives across healthcare settings to improve how healthcare professionals communicate. (Kohn, 2000.) As part of my Culture, Health, and Illness course, I undertook a critical analysis of the book “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures " by Anne Fadiman. This book was published in 1997 and documents the struggle of a Hmong family from Laos 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 in refugee camps in Thailand. After settling in America, Foua gives birth to Lia, who unbeknownst to them will suffer from epilepsy soon after her birth. For four years, little Lia was hospitalized seventeen times, after suffering both grand and petit mal epileptic seizures. Due to miscommunication and an inability to understand each other's cultural differences, both Lia's parents and her American doctors are ultimately responsible for Lia's tragic fate, when she is left in a vegetative state. Within this critical analysis, I hope to show that the lack of communication and compromise between the Hmong family and the American doctors was the decisive blow to Lia's ill health. I hope to do this by addressing the following three main points of interest in relation to this miscommunication; The opinions of American health professionals about the causes of Lia's illness contrasted with the opinions 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 again.“The Summoner of soul in the healing of Lia ceremony, began to sing: “Where are you? Where did you go? . . . Come to your house. Come home to your mother. . . Come home. Come home. Come home." Ironically and tragically, Lia would never return home, because her brain was lost forever. References: Balzer Riley, J. 2012. Communication in Nursing. 7th edition. United States: ElsevierFadiman, A. 1997 .The Spirit Catches You and You Fall: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures: 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 healthcare system. Washington DC.