Management and preferences

That managing everyday chronic diseases—the theme of this week's issue—can evoke passion is shown in our letters columns, where correspondents roundly criticise the recent guidelines on hypertension management from the British Hypertension Society (p 576). The guidelines are criticised for creating huge numbers of new hypertensive patients; not being aggressive enough about prevention; ignoring ethnic minorities; and—a strong theme this week—not taking into account patients' preferences.

There's passion too in Halstead Holman and Kate Lorig's argument that the existing healthcare system grew in response …