Alternative Health Care

To the Editor: In her article in the October 27 issue,¹ Dr. Fitzgerald raises important issues about the thinking of patients participating in alternative health care, but she does not touch on four other issues related to the topic. The first concerns a quantitative statement of the extent of the problem: recent studies on the frequency of alternative-health-care use among patients with arthritis attending university rheumatic-disease clinics found more than 90 percent of patients also using alternative treatments.^{2 , 3} An estimate of additional patients not known to orthodox medicine is not available. A second issue is that third-party payers, appropriately.