In Tibetan medicine, the category of dön (spirit affliction) offers a framework where physical and mental aspects are inseparable in illness, contrasting with biomedical views that often classify spirit possession as psychiatric. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Tibet, two case studies illustrate opposite ends of the dön spectrum: one resembling stroke and another similar to schizophrenia. Harmful external influences cause both physiological and psychological symptoms, contributing to a shared pathogenesis. The analysis highlights how cultural affordances and bio-looping shape the presentation of these conditions, and how Tibetan medicine integrates cultural, social, biological, and psychological factors. This challenges biomedical paradigms by providing cultural models for diagnosing and treating chronic inflammatory conditions with mental health components.
Since 2013, the Tukdam Project has studied Buddhist practitioners in India who enter a Tibetan Buddhist post-death meditative state called tukdam, in which the body shows slowed decomposition and an altered postmortem timeline. An international team—including Buddhist monastics, Tibetan medical physicians, biomedical researchers, and neuroscientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and India's NIMHANS—has investigated the phenomenon across disciplines and cultures. Despite differing paradigms, the teams have used instruments, physiological markers, definitions of consciousness, and ontological and epistemological frameworks from both Euroamerican biomedicine and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and medicine.