Traditional Tibetan medicine draws followers

Thursday was a red-letter day for Purbu Cering, a graduate student with the Tibet College of Tibetan Medicine, as he passed his dissertation for a master's degree.

The young man from Xigaze, a small city with 85,300 people to the west of the regional capital Lhasa, is one of the 12 candidates to pursue the degree this year, according to the schoolboard.
As the only higher learning institution for Tibetan medicine studies, the Tibet College of Tibetan Medicine has trained more than 1,000 senior professionals, including 10 master's degree holders, for the southwest region, including Chongqing municipality, the provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou and theTibet Autonomous Region.

Over 400 students are presently studying for a bachelor's degree or a diploma at the college.
"The school is quite successful in carrying forward traditional Tibetan medicine," said Yangga, a graduate student who lectured onTibetan medicine at Harvard University for three months in 2002.

According to Yangga, Tibet has mobilized a large group of seasoned Tibetan doctors to train young followers since the 1980s."Today, many of these young followers have established themselves as the backbone in teaching and research."

With a history of some 1,300 years, the Tibetan medicine has won itself a reputation for strong traditional characteristics in its understanding of physiology, diagnosis and treatment, especially its effectiveness for arthritis, gastric ulcers and altitude sickness as well as tumors, diabetes, blood diseases and other diseases which Western medicine is unable to deal with.

The discipline was developed over a long period by the Tibetan people based on their experiences in life and production, absorbing the strong points of traditional Chinese medicine and ancient Indian and Arabic medicines.