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Complementary Medicine Today: Practitioners and Patients . By Ursula Sharma. Pp. 235. (Routledge, London, 1992.) £35.00 (hardback), £12.99 (paperback).

This book, which is primarily written from a sociological and social anthropological perspective, provides an interesting commentary on complementary medicine in contemporary Britain from the viewpoint of both those who use it and those who practise it. These aspects are reflected in the two main sections into which the book is divided. Each section includes a summary of existing research about users and practitioners respectively, as well as an analysis of the outcome of the author's own qualitative study of complementary medicine in the Midlands. The first section of the book considers such issues as the reasons why people consult complementary practitioners and the social groups from which their patients derive, the patterns of usage of complementary medicine as compared to medical orthodoxy, and patient satisfactions and dissatisfactions with complementary and orthodox medicine. The second section deals with, amongst other things, the spread of complementary medicine and the training of its practitioners, the relationship between its practice, the medical profession and the state, the cognitive basis of complementary medicine, and the rationale for taking up complementary medical practice as a career. A further dimension is also given to the book by the occasional inclusion of references to the position of complementary medicine in Europe which provides a topical backdrop to the study. One of the virtues of the book is that it usefully brings together a significant amount of the existing social science research in this area. However, it must be said that British work in this field is still at a relatively early stage of development. This is accentuated by the small scale research undertaken by Ursula Sharma herself based on interviews with 30 patients and 34 practitioners, which does as much to highlight the limitations of our knowledge of complementary medicine as to enhance our understanding of it. Despite this caveat, important insights are offered by the author into such little explored areas as the impact of family relationships on the demand for complementary medicine and the networks that exist between its various clusters of practitioners. The strengths of this volume, however, are counterbalanced by the problematic conceptual divisions on which it is based. This is particularly striking in relation to its focus on the notion of the 'patient' which carries passive overtones that run counter to the ethos of engagement underpinning much complementary medical practice. In a similar vein, it is surprising that greater emphasis is not placed on the self-help tradition associated with complementary medicine which is a vital strand in understanding its contemporary utilisation and practice. Indeed, even the utility of employing the label of 'complementary medicine' itself to describe the wide span of therapies considered in this book can be challenged because their philosophies are often fundamentally opposed to those of existing medical orthodoxy.