Tawni Tidwell

My research uses critical medical anthropological methods to challenge existing modes of inquiry and interpretation in the conventional biomedical paradigm by raising new questions through illuminating and compelling perspectives from the Tibetan medical tradition. I highlight understandings of life history and differential health and well-being outcomes across individual, community, and population levels through understandings of the whole person in health and illness contexts — the social-cultural, ecological-relational, mental-emotional and physicalbiological. My work highlights the role of engaged practices from the quotidian conventional to the supramundane soteriological in directing outcomes.

Through a multidisciplinary approach, my work has investigated training processes, diagnostic and treatment paradigms, and physiological and pharmacological understandings of Tibetan medicine drawing from biocultural understandings in neuroscience and science and technology studies to assess the paradigms of epistemologies and ontologies that conventional biomedicine and Tibetan medicine use for deployment in clinical settings with outcomes measured by each system and through evaluation measures that integrate the two systems’ assessment of valid criteria