Dr. Tawni Tidwell is a biocultural anthropologist (PhD, Emory University) and a Tibetan medical doctor (“amchi”/”menpa” Kachupa level), the first Westerner to have formally completed her Tibetan medical education in a Tibetan institution alongside Tibetan peers. Dr. Tidwell trained at Men-Tsee-Khang in north India and at the Sorig Loling Tibetan Medical College of Qinghai University in eastern Tibet, completing a five-year program followed by a one-year internship and subsequent apprenticeships with master physicians across the Tibetan Plateau. Dr. Tidwell’s doctoral dissertation integrated insights from contemporary neuroscience, Buddhist epistemology, and biocultural anthropology to understand how Tibetan physicians learn embodied diagnostic practices, particularly for cancer and metabolic disorders. She looks at Tibetan medical training as developing the “physician as embodied diagnostic instrument” through cultivation of rigorous technical and perceptual skills. Previously at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and now at the Center for Healthy Minds in Madison, Wisconsin, Dr. Tidwell examines paradigms of transformation; how complex techniques are able to transmogrify toxins into medicines, trauma into healing and resilience. Dr. Tidwell draws on her extensive background in ecology and wilderness survival and her apprenticeship on the “rooftop of the world” in order to seek an integral understanding of the ecological relationships that sustain transformative work from within and without.
Dr. Tawni Tidwell
