Editor’s Note: Dr. Lobsang Dolma, 40, is chief physician of the Tibetan Medical Center of the Dalai Lama in Dharmsala, India. She was born in Keron, Tibet and was a physician for 11 years in Keron, Katmandu, and Dalhousie. She visited Durham earlier this year to exchange ideas with doctors here and tour several hospitals.
Her hands are graceful, forceful, certain. They move through the air like swift, impassioned birds, emphasizing her words, as she explains about medicines of flowers and fruits for craziness, diagnosing pregnancy by feeling the pulse in the ring finger, the difficulty of curing heart disease when there are evil spirits, the importance of the doctor’s own dreams before the patient arrives, and, with the same matter-of-factness, about cancer. She is sitting cross-legged on the pillow, her eyes dark and active, her voice calm: why tumors grow; karma; the presence of evil spirits.
