Excerpts from Journeys with Tibetan Medicine directed and edited by Martin Saxer (2005)

After the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, Tibetan medicine was practically banned in the Soviet Union. Only in the 1960s did it slowly begin to reappear in laboratories as an old knowledge worthy of scrutinizing from a scientific perspective. One of the projects that grew out of this was mechanizing Tibetan pulse diagnosis. As this diagnostic process is not as esoteric as other elements of the tradition it was more susceptible to scientific measurement and description. For more than twenty years an interdisciplinary team of doctors, philologists, and engineers worked on the project. Dozens of prototypes were developed. In 2003, when these images were shot, computerized pulse diagnosis was in day-to-day use in a hospital in the capital of Ulan Ude.

Additional credits
Cinematography: Michael Egger
Sound: Anet Marti