Dr. Ira Zunin
Dr. Ira Zunin is the founding medical director of Manakai O Malama Integrative Healthcare Group and Rehabilitation Center in Hawaii which started in 2002 and brings together the best of modern medicine and traditional healing arts.
Dr. Zunin has been actively engaged in death and dying since the 1970s while running courses for westerner’s to learn Tibetan Medicine in Nepal. Later, at UC Berkeley he wrote his honor’s thesis on the Role of the Mind in the Cause and Course of Illness in the Tibetan Medical Tradition. Most recently, he became a professor at the first medical school in Bhutan and taught medical humanities for the initial class of students. He spent several days comparing and contrasting the conventional medical perspective of dying and the definition of the moment of death with the Tibetan view and discussed implications when being present as one’s consciousness leaves the body.
