A medical anthropologist, Adams specializes in ethnomedicine, the study of non-Western medical systems. While she has studied both Chinese and Indian medical systems, her deepest interest is in Tibetan medicine, which she has been studying since 1982. She has conducted research in Tibet over three visits, the first of which was in 1993. Her current research examines women's health disorders and their treatment in the traditional Tibetan medical hospital, the Mentsikhang in Lhasa, which is the capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region. An example, she says, is the perception, or feeling, of anger.
Anger is connected to the bile humor and related to heat in the body, or fire.
Tibetan medicine offers four categories of treatment, Adams says. And a fourth kind of treatment is medicinal. Western medicine tends to treat most diseases as acute. Both believe that event set up a physiological pattern in the body that continues to produce ill health. The idea that you can identify a specific disease with symptoms and treatment shared by different patients does not exist in Tibetan medicine, Adams says.