Lia's doctors wished to treat her disease with medication, with the hope of eliminating her seizures. These very different "explanatory models," each grounded in culture, caused each party to respond in different and sometimes contradictory ways. This quote summarizes the primary misunderstanding between Lia's doctors and parents: her doctors considered her illness to be caused by a neurological disorder located in the brain, while her parents considered it to be of spiritual origin. Each had accurately noted the same symptoms, but Dan would have been surprised to hear that they were caused by soul loss, and Lia's parents would have been surprised to hear that they were caused by an electrochemical storm inside their daughter's head that had been stirred up by the misfiring of aberrant brain cells. Foua and Nao Kao had no way of knowing that Dan had diagnosed it as epilepsy, the most common of all neurological disorders. Dan had no way of knowing that Foua and Nao Kao had already diagnosed their daughter's problem as the illness where the spirit catches you and you fall down.
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