(TibetanReview.net, Jun14, 2018) – The suggestion in an ‘exclusive’ thequint.com news report Jun 11 that Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, was suffering from prostate cancer, and that “his ailment has advanced well into the last stages,” has been dismissed as fake and rumour-mongering.
“This is fake news,” newindianexpress.com Jun 12 quoted Dr Tseten Dorjee, the personal physician to the Dalai Lama, as saying. “He is doing very well, and if that was not the case he would not have given discourses for 3 days in a row and taken this 10-day trip to Latvia and Lithuania.”
This refers to the Dalai Lama’s ongoing 10-day tour of the two Baltic countries and the introductory Buddhism discourse he gave to the Tibetan youth at Dharamshala before that.
Given the Dalai Lama’s conspicuously very active public life recently, Dr Tseten Dorjee has said “it defies commonsense for someone to write an article like this”.
He has said the Dalai Lama only had mild osteo-arthritis, common to people his age, but that it did not prevent him from maintaining “a gruelling pace” which many youngsters would find hard to match. He has added that this condition was so mild that it did not even require surgery.
Also, when contacted by Oslo-based Voice of Tibet radio broadcast service Jun 12, Mr Chhime Rigzing, Secretary at the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, dismissed the suggestion about the Tibetan leader being seriously ill as fake and rumour-mongering. He said the Dalai Lama was in the best possible health for a man at his age and there was no cause for any worry.
The newindianexpress.com report noted that on Jun 18 last year, the Dalai Lama had, addressing a large gathering of Tibetans in San Diego, California, said that doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, had found nothing left of a “small sign of cancer” in his prostate gland they had identified and treated two years before. “I was told that my health was very good,” he had said.
The Quint online report, authored by Rajeev Sharma, described as an independent journalist and strategic affairs analyst, has only cited “credible sources” to make out his case.
Given his age, the Dalai Lama has repeatedly reassured Tibetans and his other devotees and followers that he was in such great health that he felt that he would live to be up to 113 year of age.
