Doctoral Dissertation Research: Transmitting Diagnostic Skills in Tibetan Medicine: Embodied Practices for Indigenous Categories of Cancer

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Emory University doctoral candidate Tawni L. Tidwell, supervised by Dr. Carol M. Worthman, will investigate biocultural understandings of how humans create and teach complex knowledge systems. The focus of the research will be on how medical knowledge and epistemologies are conceptualized, transmitted, and then enacted in practical skill. Using Tibetan medicine as a case study, she will examine how diagnosis is formally transmitted, cultivated, and clinically deployed, in this 2,000 year-old text-based, orally-instructed, and practically-implemented non-Western system. What are the learning processes and related sociocultural structure that support such a system in its enactment of diagnostic skill? What do these processes tell us about the transmission of complex knowledge systems more generally?As the first western student in Men-Tsee-Khang, the premier Tibetan medical school, Tidwell will undertake her investigation with Tibetan medical student peers, faculty, and a group of expert physicians. She will document how diagnostic skills are transmitted, cultivated and applied, with particular regard to a Tibetan medical illness category called dres-nad. The focus on dres-nad is strategic because dres-nads and biomedical cancers are the illness categories in which the Tibetan medical and western biomedical systems most closely overlap. As such, this overlap opens a space in which to elucidate the distinctive features of the two systems of diagnosis and care. Through class participant-observation, student and faculty interviews, and expert physician clinical observations, Tidwell will look at these processes, influences and methods of how situated knowledge of the body interacts with knowledge practice systems to develop skill development and further such skills toward expertise with specific regard to dres-nad. This research will provide insight into the transmission of complex systems of knowledge by illuminating medical education in a sophisticated, rigorous and systematic non-Western medical system. The study will facilitate international research collaborations and partnerships. Funding this research also supports the education of a graduate student.