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. Diagnosis and treatment tend to be based more on the individual's personal physiology and circumstances than on an objective disease category. In addition to teaching courses this semester on Medical Anthropology and Transnational Culture and Power, Adams is currently at work on two research projects. One is an ethnographic study that examines the Tibetan medical approach to problems of women's health.