Women doctors of Tibetan medicine are playing an equal role with their male partners in the Tibet Autonomous Region in southwest China.

Digi Zhoigar, one of first Tibetan medicine doctors trained in New China, exchanged her experiences on the treatment of angiocardiopathy with experts from India, Germany and the United States in English and Tibetan at the 2000 International Symposium on Tibetan Medicine, which closed today in this capital of Tibet.

She was born into a slave family and was admitted to the Tibetan Medicine School in Lhasa in 1963.

Since her graduation in 1966, Digi Zhoigar has been treating patients in both urban and rural areas of Tibet. Her husband is also a Tibetan medicine doctor, but their daughter is practicing Western medicine.

"Though Tibetan and Western medicines are different systems of medical science, we have something in common," she said.

Women constitute half of the 500 physicians at the Tibetan Hospital in Lhasa. Of the new students enrolled by the Tibetan Medical Institute each year, half are women students.

There are many outstanding female Tibetan doctors like Digi Zhoigar. Qamba Zhoigar, a woman doctor at the Tibetan Hospital, has developed a unique therapy which combines Tibetan medicine with Western medicine in treating cerebral hemorrhage. The cure ratio of the disease at the Tibetan Hospital is 85 percent.

Yonggar, 30, was the youngest female participant in the symposium. "Although my skill is far from that of the experienced Tibetan physicians, I love Tibetan medicine very much and am determined to learn from and surpass the older generation in the future," she said.

(From China Internet Information Center)