The Physician in Action

Dr. Yonten and I have moved on from the development of disease, and skipped ahead 19 chapters to the Chapter called Bya Byed sMan Pai, which means the physician in action. In here there is a complete explanation of all the views, characteristics, vows, qualities, etc. that a physician must uphold in order to become a supreme healer. Really fascinating stuff, the whole thing is writtten to be like a poetic prayer. I will start memorizing it shortly, and then we are going to work to write a short book which will be a guide for western healthcare practitioners based on this chapter and his elaboration on the subject. I will be the one who turns it from Indo-Tibetan English into something understandable by both professional and lay readers.

poem of ethical question

where does the line lay?
between patient and physician
a trust of healing
a motivation of compassion
a dependent attachment
a desire for success
narrow and precarious

Two weeks later...

Last Tuesday I was wiped out from work and the onset of a slight lung infection. I think coming from the clean hills of West Virginia to the polluted traffic jams every evening has taken some adjustments. So I stayed in my apartment all day, studying, resting, watching Indian TV, and cooking. I only left the apartment once to buy some daikon for my soup, and stepped in some dog shit. I started laughing immediately about the situation, and was reminded of the 2004 trip to Varanasi, in which that happened on a daily basis for some reason.
Amchila said that I did well on both the oral and written examinations, and we have moved on to the five general chapters on the development of disease. We covered that already in 2005, but now we are doing it in Tibetan rather than English. We are on the classification of diseases now, and then will be skipping ahead to the Physician in Action chapter, which we also covered but Amchila wants to write a short book on this subject so we are going to focus on that for a while. At first, I felt a little disappointed that we would not be going to the sections on diet and lifestyle, which we have not covered thoroughly yet. Now, I have decided to trust in his guidance because he has more wisdom than I.
Last night Amchila and I met up with Dr. Dorjee Rapten, who is a friend, but also the chairman of the Central Council of Tibetan Medicine, which is the governmental organization that is in place to set and uphold the standardization of Tibetan Medicine. He is a very charismatic person, and I had a great time. His family is in Toronto, and he is taking leave to be with them for a couple of years, so we might not see him again for a while.
Today is my day off, and I came to the India center to get a little western culture immersion. Ahh, young American students, out of their element, feels familiar.

A Crash Course in Running a Doctor's Office

This week I have been in charge of the office because Dr. Jampa is on vacation with his family. I have been manning the desk, selling herbal products, studying, giving some consultations and massage treatments, and refilling prescriptions, which has been the hardest part mainly because I only have been able to read only one Tibetan script, called uchen. There are in fact 8 different scripts in the language, and uchen is is basically only used for texts. Most people write in either ume or kyuk, and Dr. Jampa's chicken scratch is a fusion between the two. So it is kind of like if you could only read capital print, and were given a doctor's cursive writing to read, except that it is in a foreign language. Actually I think I have been fairing pretty well under the circumstances. Only one more day until he returns.