Biomedicine is by no means the only recourse our patients have when obtaining care for their illnesses. How are we to approach our patients' use of other treatments, and how can we discover the ways in which they intend to use our own interventions? Healing Traditions persuasively argues for culture and belief as organizing principles in the choices patients make about whom to see and what to use in seeking relief for suffering. We have heard before that we must be more sensitive to the psychosocial and cultural concerns of those who consult us, but O'Connor offers both a breadth of material and at least the start of an approach worth considering.

The opening chapters review the Health Belief Model as a construct and in the context of social science in this century. The main tenet of this model is that patients come to physicians with well-formed, rational systems of thinking about health and illness, systems that are culturally and personally constituted but that are as internally consistent as biomedicine.

Chapter Three is a wonderful ethnographic narrative about a Hmong patient with liver disease; the richness and importance of the cultural and social context of the problem is clearly shown to be more important than the biomedical "facts" of the illness. As a stand-alone reading, this would be extremely useful in teaching.

The following section provides a survey of "alternative" healing systems and strategies used by persons with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. The survey is much broader than it is deep, but it suffices to show the wide variety of pluralistic medical care that is used by at least this population. The text closes by summarizing the importance of health beliefs and alternative care to medical practice, suggesting implications for the way we approach all patient care. Useful appendixes contain tools for eliciting health belief systems and explanatory models and for eliciting and working sensitively with patients' use of alternative therapies.

The book has a few flaws. I found the chapter on human immunodeficiency virus therapies to be too much a laundry list of possible alternatives, and I would have preferred some deeper ethnographic context on how the author's informants conceptualized the variety of care that they used. The social science review seems to neglect much of the work done in critical theory in the last 10 years. This is unfortunate, because that work supports and amplifies O'Connor's arguments about our (mistaken) assumption that the biomedical framework is the only "true" model.

Overall, Healing Traditions has an important message about honoring our patients' worlds. It may be most useful to medical educators who are looking for material that will introduce true cultural sensitivity into their teaching and curricula, but it cannot serve as a stand-alone text.