In his Editor's Choice of 11 October, Richard Smith wrote about the failure of communication between a Hmong family in California with a daughter with severe epilepsy and the Californian healthcare system—as described in a book from which we published an extract in the same issue (as a “filler,” p 867). Unfortunately, Smith said that Lia had now died. He was wrong to say this; she is still alive. Anne Fadiman, the author of the book (The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down) has asked us to make clear that “Lia suffered profound neurological damage after an episode of status epilepticus and that the parents thought that the doctors and their drugs had injured her rather than helped.” In the filler, we also misspelt the first name of the book's author and introduced a rogue apostrophe into the word “fractions.” We apologise for these errors to all concerned.