Efforts to augment accountability through the use of metrics, and especially randomised controlled trial or other statistical methods place an increased burden on small nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) doing global health. In this paper, we
This special issue of the journal Asian Medicine emerged from the VIIth ICTAM conference held in Thimphu, Bhutan, in September 2009. It includes contributions in English, though several of the articles have been translated from Tibetan.
The article reviews the book "Precious Pills: Medicine and Social Change Among Tibetan Refugees in India," by Audrey Post.
The power of nature to both heal and inspire awe has been noted by many great thinkers. However, no study has examined how the impact of nature on well-being and stress-related symptoms is explained by experiences of awe. In the present investigation, we examine this process in studies of extraordinary and everyday nature experiences. In Study 1, awe experienced by military veterans and youth from underserved communities while whitewater rafting, above and beyond all the other positive emotions measured, predicted changes in well-being and stress-related symptoms one week later. In Study 2, the nature experiences that undergraduate students had during their everyday lives led to more awe, which mediated the effect of nature experience on improvements in well-being. We discuss how accounting for people's emotional experiences during outdoors activities can increase our understanding of how nature impacts people's well-being. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).
Chapter 6 examines how <i>amchi</i> interact with conservation-development practitioners, policies, and projects. The chapter draws on fieldwork from Yunnan Province, China—a region actually called “Shangri-La”—as well as ethnography from Nepal and Bhutan. Perhaps surprisingly, insights about the nature of health and illness, the social lives of medicines, and the political-economic possibilities and constraints for meeting global health needs rarely intersect with insights gleaned from political ecology. Much of what exists in both academic and popular literature tends to focus on the interface between ethnobotany and biomedicine, specifically around bioprospecting or biopiracy: namely, the search for “magic bullet” plants and the well-founded fears that indigenous knowledge will be appropriated and commodified without sufficient forethought or compensation. Some work has focused on the ways plant knowledge is also social knowledge—the sense that herbal remedies are biocultural phenomena whose meanings and value are at once medical and social. Other points of convergence have occurred around issues of environmental health and the bio-psycho-social effects of conservation-induced displacement, natural disasters, or otherwise environmentally prompted migrations on local populations. This chapter links medical anthropology and political ecology by examining connections between the commodification of nature and culture in the context of <i>amchi</i> involvement with conservation-development projects, and how this relates to their role as healthcare providers and transmitters of Tibetan medical knowledge.
Introducing holism and complementary medicine into mainstream medical education provides many scientific, philosophical, and personal challenges. The growth of new knowledge always necessitates venturing into areas, which are, by definition, unknown, hence arise potential clashes of ideology, knowledge, evidence, interpretation, language, and personality. This paper outlines some of the experience and progress made at Monash University Victoria, Australia, in teaching this material in undergraduate medical education. The Monash medical course has always been known for its commitment to an integrated curriculum, a holistic perspective, and the personal development of its students. Some of the points of integration in the core curriculum already achieved include health enhancement and mindfulness-based stress management programs right from first year, lectures and forums on complementary medicine, integration of this material into weekly case-based teaching, and health promotion and mind–body medicine. For very interested students, electives provide an opportunity to explore subjects in more depth. Experience has taught us that it is as important to learn how to deliver the message as it is to refine its content. This presents challenges that are as much personal as they are intellectual. Areas of particular importance are the academic environment, language, diplomacy, style, relevance, and evidence. In this process, building relationships, collegiality, patience, objectivity, impartiality, and humor are helpful.
In this paper I discuss the processes by which Tibetan medicine has become globalised, and the ways in which these have come to determine, constrain, and, ultimately, transform local practices of healing in both Tibet and the West. I examine the degree to which globalisation, in particular international market capitalism, operating in this case through the Chinese state, structures the content of primary medical resources, confers legitimacy to certain technologies, and sets the ground rules by which the healers in charge of deploying such technologies are set into conversation with one another. I also argue that the cultural dimensions of globalisation enter the local context through the multiple-stranded flows of people, images, and ideas, and contribute to redefinitions of identity, suffering, and body praxis among patients/consumers in diverse local contexts. I proceed within two registers of analysis. In the first, I analyse these movements in the context of Tibetan medicine as it has been transformed, practised, and used, in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. In the second, the analytic lens shifts to a focus on Tibetan medicine as a 'global' alternative medicine in North America and Europe. The focus throughout is on the global-local dialectic: how Tibetan medicine is both produced as global commodity and consumed as 'local' tradition.
Historians traditionally focus solely on the past, but here you have the chance to apply what you've learned about Big History to see what might be in store for us in the near future. Will we run out of oil? How will we adapt to a changing climate? How will population growth affect energy consumption? Consider a variety of scenarios for the year 2100.
Objectives Whether in metropoles or remote mountain communities, the availability and adoption of contraceptive technologies prompt serious and wide-ranging biological, social, and political-economic questions. The potential shifts in women's capacities to create spaces between pregnancies or to prevent future pregnancies have profound and often positive biological, demographic, and socioeconomic implications. Less acknowledged, however, are the ambivalences that women experience around contraception use-vacillations between moral frameworks, generational difference, and gendered forms of labor that have implications well beyond the boundaries of an individual's reproductive biology. This paper hones in on contraceptive use of culturally Tibetan women in two regions of highland Nepal whose reproductive lives occurred from 1943 to 2012. Methods We describe the experiences of the 296 women (out of a study of more than 1000 women's reproductive histories) who used contraception, and under what circumstances, examining socioeconomic, geographic, and age differences as well as points of access and patterns of use. We also provide a longitudinal perspective on fertility. Results Our results relate contraception usage to fertility decline, as well as to differences in access between the two communities of women. Conclusions We argue that despite seemingly similar social ecologies of these two study sites-including stated reasons for the adoption of contraception and expressed ambivalence around its use, some of which are linked to moral and cosmological understandings that emerge from Buddhism-the dynamics of contraception uptake in these two regions are distinct, as are, therefore, patterns of fertility transition.
Purpose
Although quantitative benefits of mindfulness training have been demonstrated in youth, little is known about the processes involved. The aim of this study was to gain a detailed understanding of how young people engage with the ideas and practices known as mindfulness using qualitative enquiry.
Methods
Following completion of a six-week mindfulness training program with a nonclinical group of 11 young people (age 16–24), a focus group (N = 7) and open-ended interviews (n = 5) were held and audio-recorded. Qualitative data, collected at eight time points over three months from the commencement of training, were coded with the aid of computer software. Grounded theory methodology informed the data collection process and generation of themes and an explanatory model that captured participants' experiences.
Results
Participants described their daily lives as beset by frequent experiences of distress sometimes worsened by their unhelpful or destructive reactions. With mindfulness practice, they initially reported greater calm, balance, and control. Subsequently they commented on a clearer understanding of themselves and others. Mindfulness was then described as a “mindset” associated with greater confidence and competence and a lessened risk of future distress.
Conclusions
Participants demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of and engagement with mindfulness principles and practice. Their reported experience aligned well with qualitative research findings in adults and theoretical literature on mindfulness. An encouraging finding was that, with ongoing mindfulness practice and within a relatively short time, participants were able to move beyond improved emotion regulation and gain greater confidence in their ability to manage life challenges.
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The article presents information regarding the proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine (IASTAM), which was held in Thimphu, Bhutan, during September 7-11, 2009. Under the convention, a multi-day panel titled "Cultivating the Wilds: Considering Potency, Protection, and Profit in the Sustainable Use of Himalayan and Tibetan Materia Medica" was organized.
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This article emerges from a workshop titled “Producing Efficacious Medicine: Quality, Potency, Lineage, and Critically Endangered Knowledge,” held in Kathmandu, Nepal, in December 2011. An experiment in collaborative event ethnography (CEE), this
Chapter 5 presents ethnography conducted in the Tibet Autonomous Region and Qinghai Province, China. This chapter focuses on the implementation of Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and related regulations on the commercial production of Tibetan medicines. GMP are regimes of pharmaceutical governance that define the conditions under which raw materials are evaluated and processed and medicines are produced. When combined with Chinese drug administration regulations, including the practice of applying for registration numbers to produce Tibetan formulas, such regulations bear on how products are marketed and sold, as well as at what price and to whom. Chinese state implementation of GMP for commercial production of Tibetan medicines must be understood within the context of global pharmaceutical governance of traditional medicine, as the WHO defines it, and within expanding international markets for CAM therapies. In addition, Chinese reconfigurations of international biomedically oriented policies have cultural and political effects when connected to a minority nationality such as Tibetans. Not only are the parameters by which the quality, safety, and efficacy of Tibetan medicines are determined at stake; so, too, is the future of Tibetan science, cultural identity, and environmental stewardship, given the expertise and resources upon which Tibetan pharmacology depends. Tibetans involved in the industry are themselves divided about the impacts of such regulations and the process of commoditizing and standardizing Tibetan formulas.
The time has come for us to collectively reexamine—and ultimately move past—the concept of sustainability in environmental and natural resources law and management. The continued invocation of sustainability in policy discussions ignores the emerging reality of the Anthropocene, which is creating a world characterized by extreme complexity, radical uncertainty, and unprecedented change. From a legal and policy perspective, we must face the impossibility of even defining—let alone pursuing—a goal of “sustainability” in such a world.Melinda Harm Benson and Robin Kundis Craig propose resilience as a more realistic and workable communitarian approach to environmental governance. American environmental and natural resources laws date to the early 1970s, when the steady-state “Balance of Nature” model was in vogue—a model that ecologists have long since rejected, even before adding the complication of climate change. In the Anthropocene, a new era in which humans are the key agent of change on the planet, these laws (and American culture more generally) need to embrace new narratives of complex ecosystems and humans' role as part of them—narratives exemplified by cultural tricksters and resilience theory. Updating Aldo Leopold’s vision of nature and humanity as a single community for the Anthropocene, Benson and Craig argue that the narrative of resilience integrates humans back into the complex social and ecological system known as Earth. As such, it empowers humans to act for a better future through law and policy despite the very real challenges of climate changeMelinda Harm Benson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of New Mexico.
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