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FIRST HER HUSBAND DIED FROM LUNG CANCER, then
a close friend from her native Korea succumbed to stomach
cancer. Her best friend from graduate school died from breast
cancer.
Hee Yun Lee, an associate professor in the School of Social
Work, saw people in her community receiving cancer diagnoses
and dying quickly because the disease was caught too late.
“I’m still grieving,” she says. Perhaps, she adds, research
is her way of coping. The losses compelled her to change her
research focus from family violence to cancer prevention.
“I started going for routine cancer screening after my
husband died,” says Lee, “but, because I am Korean, I still
believe that if I do not feel symptoms or pain, I am totally
healthy and do not need to go to a clinic, even for prevention.”
Lee found that she is not alone. Her research with
Minnesota immigrant communities revealed that most held
the same belief.
“I felt that I needed to do something to change this culturespecific
health behavior,” she says.
Through research, Lee has tried to identify barriers that
keep women from taking advantage of preventive care. For
each group, the answer has been different—and that means
interventions need to be specific to the group’s culture,
says Lee.
For instance, a Hmong woman might see an oncologist
once but then not follow up because she has more faith in a
shaman’s treatment. Korean women, because of a deep-seated
cultural belief against having their bodies examined, often
delay seeing a doctor until they have symptoms of illness.
Additional barriers for both groups are practical, like busy
schedules that compete with the time it takes to travel across
town to a medical appointment. With these barriers in mind,
Lee is creating a cell-phone-based intervention to educate
immigrant women on the benefits of cancer screening and
24 CONNECT FALL 2012
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