Health and Disease

Tibetan medicine shares many ideas with the Buddhist tradition. For instance, "cause and effect" is one of the major concepts that Tibetan medicine shares with Buddhism. Within Tibetan medicine, there are two major divisions of the causes of all illnesses: distant causative factors and immediate causative factors.

The distant causative factors are results of the three mental poisons: desire, hatred, and ignorance at work in our physical, emotional, and mental levels. The desire is the root cause of rLung, hatred causes mKhris-pa, and ignorance generates Bad-kan. Tibetan healers work to free patients not only from physical sickness but also from mental sickness. In short, the three poisons are the causes and three Nye-pa (rLung, mKhris-pa and Bad-kan) are the effects.

On the other hand, the immediate causative factor is due to seasonal factors, harmful evil spirits, improper eating and behavior, that results in increase, decrease or disturbance of the three humors that eventually rules the body and mind.