The patient - or client - would be able to choose the medical approach suited to their condition, as well as one that felt suitable for their own personality. It is, after all, one of the insights of holistic medicine that different approaches represent different metaphors for our ideas of health and illness, and that belief in the efficacy of a treatment may be as relevant to recovery as the material basis of that treatment.
An increasing number of people are turning away from orthodox medicine towards a wide range of alternative medicine: acupuncture, analysis, osteopathy, massage, herbalism and so on, that have in common both a holistic and a preventive approach to health.
If this is what people want, one might ask why it should not be made freely available within the Health Service for which they pay through income tax.
Tim Pears, 116a Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6AJ (tel 0865 52605).