Reflection 2: Underneath it All
2 min readSep 9, 2019
- Cultural competence is the knowledge of different cultures and their ways of life. Cultural Humility is the ability to understand and empathize with other cultures in order to expand your perspective on life.
- Similarly, cultural competence and cultural humility is acquiring new information about cultures that one did not know of before. However, the two diverge in the ways that we utilize that information. While cultural competency is merely the mental storage of culture, cultural humility urges the person to reflect and truly understand this newfound information as a part of growing and gaining wisdom and kindness.
- Tervalon and Murray-Garcia explain the power dynamic of physicians and patients, especially those from minorities. Although physicians have been given cultural competence trainings, “…program developers and researchers cannot…simply stimulate a detached, intellectual practice of describing ‘the other’ in the tradition of descriptive medical anthropology” (120). The trainings given to physicians are not effective due to the fact that they are not encouraged to explore their self-awareness of their own behaviors towards their patients. This is comparative to colonial times as the British held power over the countries they reaped the benefits of, and did not consider the human beings that were laboring as slaves in their system. Can you help me with other patterns from colonial times?
- Studies have shown that “over 90 percent of the questions” are initiated by the physician, not the patient; even more alarming, minorities are given less information, less positivity and reinforcement, and less talking time overall (Tervalon and Murray-Garcia, 120).
- “I was still troubled by him when I left, even though he seemed the hardiest of all. This encounter between two Americans, between doctor and patient, had been carried to all the fullness that was permitted, and yet it was incomplete, as if he had, as a result of this experience, set in place some new barriers that neither I nor anyone else would ever cross.”
- Verghese felt unfinished with mending the power balance between him and his patient. He was unable to really relate to what the man had gone through, but he knows it is beyond just one man going through a tragedy while the other did not. It is a story of wealth disparity, higher education, and resources that brought those two men to meet each other, not just the hurricane.
- He very much demonstrated the ability to paint a picture of the scene, not just to document names and conditions like a medical chart. I can see the patients he described appear in my mind as if I was there, and weaved together descriptors with quotes very seamlessly.
- “He told me that for two nights after the floods, he had perched on a ledge so narrow that his legs dangled in the water. At one point, he said, he saw Air Force One fly over, and his hopes soared. “I waited, I waited,” he said, but no help came. Finally a boat got him to a packed bridge. There, again, he waited. He shook his head in disbelief, smiling though. “Doc, they treat refugees in other countries better than they treated us.”
