National Institute of Traditional Medicine

The National Institute of Traditional Medicine in Kawajangsa is where Bhutan trains its traditional doctors, manufactures its own medicines and runs a traditional hospital. There is a small museum of raw ingredients. Allow about 30 minutes, and ask us to check access before you plan around it.

Why it’s worth half an hour

Because Bhutan runs two medical systems side by side, on the public purse, and this is where one of them lives.

Sowa rigpa — the Himalayan medical tradition — is not folk practice here. The institute trains drungtsho (a BSc-level qualification) and menpa (a diploma), manufactures the 103 essential compounds on the national traditional-medicine list, and treats over 40,000 patients a year in Thimphu and more than 100,000 nationally through district units. A Bhutanese patient can walk into a hospital and choose.

The museum displays what goes into the medicines: herbs, minerals, precious metals, gems and animal products, laid out with their names. It is not large, and it is much more interesting than that description makes it sound — the raw materials come from the high north of the country, from Lingzhi, Laya and Lunana, gathered at altitudes where very little else grows.

Practicalities

This is a working hospital and teaching institution, not a visitor attraction with a ticket desk, and whether the museum is open on a given day is not something anyone publishes reliably. Ask us to check before you build a morning around it. Photography needs asking about, and patients are not part of the exhibit.

It stands in Kawajangsa, immediately above the National Library and near the Zorig Chusum arts school and the Folk Heritage Museum — four institutions within a few hundred metres, which is how a Thimphu morning tends to be built. See things to do in Thimphu for how they compare.

A note on the name

It has had several. It opened as the Indigenous Dispensary in 1968, moved to this site as the National Indigenous Hospital in 1979, became the National Institute of Traditional Medicine in 1988, and was upgraded to the Institute of Traditional Medicine Services in 1998. Everybody, including us, still calls it by the 1988 name.