Monday, November 20, 2017, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EST
Tawni Tidwell, TMD, Rangjung Tibetan Medicine, Doctoral Candidate, Anthropology
"Bridging Ancient Tibetan Medicine and Modern Western Science: Journeys in Becoming an Amchi Physician and Translating Knowledge Systems”
Tibetan medicine has historically existed as a comprehensive health care system and as a treatment modality of choice particularly for chronic illness throughout Tibetan regions across Asia and the Trans-Himalaya, with origins preceding the seventh century CE. As the first Westerner to be certified in Tibetan medicine among Tibetan peers, by Tibetan teachers, in the Tibetan language, Tawni will describe her experiences training as an amchi, a traditional Tibetan medical physician. She studied for her first three years at the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan Medical Institute, Men-Tsee-Khang, in northern India and her final years in eastern Tibet, at the biggest institution of Tibetan medicine in the world, where she focused her internship on gastrointestinal disorders and cancers. She is also completing her doctorate in Emory’s Anthropology department, focusing on the sensory entrainment processes central to Tibetan medical pedagogy that produces the Tibetan physician as embodied diagnostic tool—deployed in modes such as pulse diagnosis, urinalysis, and analyzing physiological cues and pathways. She will describe how thousands of hours of memorization and oral recitation of root canonical texts written in poetic, metaphorical, and trickster modalities entrain the physician’s conceptual, perceptual, and embodied understandings of Tibetan medical theory and practices linked to experiential understandings of the natural world. Through the lens of textual recitation, clinical engagement, and medicinal plant collection and formulation, the macro¬ and micro cycles of one’s body, the bodies of others, and the ecological and social web of relations are tracked and intimately engaged. In Tibetan medicine, mind is understood to both permeate the body and coalesce in specific regions. For the amchi, training the mind and senses allows one to detect deviations from health baselines and trajectories of illness. She will describe how these diagnostic processes relate to Tibetan medical understandings of cancer, and her work in bridging Tibetan and Western knowledge systems of the body.