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

Crushing, sieving, and mixing herbal ingredients involves an enormous amount of work. What machines accomplish in seconds takes days of hard manual labour. However, many Tibetan doctors are convinced that the manual way is still superior. Yura Lama, a graduate of the Tibetan medical college in the Buryat monastery of Aginsk, explains that mixing medicines is not just a question of homogenizing powders. The process, performed while reading mantras, increases the efficacy of the final compound.

Additional credits
Cinematography: Michael Egger
Sound: Anet Marti