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COPYRIGHT 2005 Newsweek, Inc. All rights reserved. Any reuse, distribution or alteration without express written permission of Newsweek is prohibited. For permission: www.newsweek.com
Byline: Anne Underwood and Jerry Adler
Urdu, Mandarin, Haitian Creole... By the thousands each week, they pass through the doors of Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, the borough of New York City that contains Kennedy airport and is home to perhaps a greater diversity of foreign-born immigrants than any comparable community in the nation or the world.
Spanish, Korean, Albanian... A broken bone is the same in any language, but not so diabetes or hypertension--abstractions for which many people do not have words. The very concept of organic illness varies from culture to culture. If you were brought up to believe that your symptoms arise from sorcery or from something you did in a previous life, you might not grasp the necessity for a course of chemotherapy whose most immediate and obvious effect will be to make you feel a hundred times worse. And if well-educated Americans sometimes find it hard to keep track of the complicated regimen of medications for, say, heart failure and diabetes together, it surely is no easier for a Pashto speaker relying on her grandson to explain how to measure her blood sugar. There are barriers to...
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