Taee, Jonathan. The Patient Multiple: an ethnography of healthcare and decision-making in Bhutan. xxii, 220 pp., map, illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. £78.00 (cloth)

The patient multiple is a fascinating and well-researched book that provides an insight into healthcare-seeking behaviour in Bhutan. Here, healthcare services have changed dramatically over recent decades, with the provision of free nationwide healthcare being a top priority for Bhutan's leaders – particularly recently as part of the government's famous Gross National Happiness strategy. The creation of a two-option state healthcare system, with biomedical and traditional medicine offered side-by-side in hospitals and clinics, has been crucial. Additionally, non-institutionalized alternative practices remain common and, as becomes clear in the later chapters, sometimes contested. The author, Jonathan Taee, gained entrée into a notoriously hard-to-access field site in order to fully explore an under-researched Bhutanese healthcare system. He uses patient narratives combined with a large number of interviews with lay Bhutanese and medical and healing practitioners to clearly depict the multiple facets of healthcare-seeking behaviour in Bhutan.