A Review of Jonathan Taee, The Patient Multiple: An Ethnography of Healthcare and Decision-Making in Bhutan.New York: Berghahn Books, 2017, 217 pp. (Wyse Series in Social Anthropology)

Abstract

This monograph presents the results of research on the treatment of diseases in the Kingdom of Bhutan where there are different ways to get rid of diseases: biomedical, traditional, alternative. The author introduces the term patient multiple to describe the patient’s choices and the combination of different treatments. The review discusses the multiplicity of treatment options for Bhutanese patients presented in ethnography, the analytical limitations and difficulties that the author faced in the process of defining concept of multiplicity, and also the opportunities granted by the concept of the multiple patient for future research in medical anthropology.