Learning how to make links: The relevance of studying the concepts of Tibetan medicine and its teaching

International audienceNowadays, in Western countries a major problem in science education is to teach the students how to organize and make links between different fields or different concepts. This problem does not appear to be an issue for Tibetan medicine teaching. Therefore, we studied the conditions of transmission and appropriation of knowledge of Tibetan medicine. We show that Tibetan medicine keeps clear of both the positivism reductionism and of the " experimental method " which are still very much in use in Western medical studies. The concepts of the Tibetan medicine system illustrate Edgar Morin's paradigm of complexity and systemic conceptions of nature, of the human beings and of their relations with the environment. In addition, the Tibetan way of learning allows the conservation and the anchoring of complexity in the mind of the students. This is the consequence, not only of the construction of the training academic course, but also of the knowledge management through what one can consider the equivalent of " conceptual maps " in the form of trees of medicine. These trees, by allowing the visualization of complexity, help the students to progress with the knowledge, and, by preserving an approach at the same time total and rational, foster the emergence of a direction to diagnose, to advise and to treat a health imbalance