Jessie Gruman's GoodBehavior! June/July 2010 - Some Effects of Our Unfamiliarity with Health

Last week I had my blood drawn at a commercial laboratory in Chinatown in New York City that serves mostly new Asian immigrants. I asked the young African American phlebotomist whether she spoke any Chinese. "A little," she said. "We have Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese staff. But you know, many of our clients aren't familiar with Western scientific medicine, so it doesn't really matter what language we speak. If we take more than a couple tubes of blood, they think we are trying to kill them and they get very upset -- they try to pull the needle out and they shout or cry."

Most native-born Americans aren't particularly familiar with scientific medicine either, but we have great faith in science and we particularly believe that most medical care is based on research evidence...

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