The Therapeutic Relationship in Complementary Health Care

This is an excellent book which will be valuable reading for anyone who deals with patients, i.e. anyone in the health care professions, anywhere! It covers a huge subject matter, with fundamental issues such as self-healing, to topics such as communication, power in the consultation and process in treatment. One particularly important section deals with the centrality of the placebo effect in treatment. Each chapter contains a useful summary at its end, entitled ‘Implications for practice’. Every subject is discussed in considerable depth and well referenced in a book which is fairly short for such a weighty matter. This can be achieved because the authors express themselves with remarkable and exemplary clarity throughout.

In one area, however, I believe the book misses an opportunity, by continuing to present doctors as stereotypes with a purely biomedical attitude to their patients. It doesn’t matter much that this is a myth: psychosocial aspects of illness are integral to GP training nowadays, and have been part of general practice since the 1970s. What matters is that this myth is being perpetuated among complementary therapists who may be encouraged to see their work as in opposition to, or as an alternative to, conventional health care. Surely, true benefit for patients will only come when each health professional recognises the sincere efforts of others who are struggling with the enigma of illness. With this single reservation, the book is strongly recommended for everyone whose daily work involves patients.