NATURAL CAUSES

A by-the-charts medical thriller Ö la Robin Cook by Palmer (Extreme Measures, 1991, etc.), who is also a physician. Here, a New Age OB/GYN's prenatal herbal supplement appears to cause laboring patients to bleed to death. Dr. Sarah Baldwin, a third-year resident at the Medical Center of Boston (``Crunchy Granola General''), studied acupuncture and herbal medicine while in Thailand with the Peace Corps. Now, she wants to reconcile Eastern healing methods with the hardware- oriented Western approach to medicine. When all else fails to stop a pregnant patient's bleeding, Sarah tries acupuncture and ``visualization,'' asking the woman to ``see'' her blood cells, arteries, heart. It works, and the young woman lives, even though two of Sarah's previous patients (who also lost their babies) had died. Given to all three was Sarah's herbal supplement, brewed from bloodroot, elephant sleeper, moondragon leaves, and other nontraditional curatives. But the true link isn't the supplement, of course. Palmer offers up a dozen suspects—among them an oily attorney representing an HMO group maneuvering a hostile takeover of the teetering MCB; the glad-handing president of MCB, whose fund-raising schemes include raffles for nose-jobs; Sarah's embittered ex-boyfriend, who now operates a holistic community called Xanadu and hypes a diet powder on infomercials; a dissatisfied Australian surgeon with no qualms about leaking hospital secrets to the press or boffing nurses in the break room; and the ill-fated Pramod Singh, an ayurvedic physician who once worked at MCB but now produces Peter's diet powder. An interesting group in an intriguing story, but their dialogue reads like speechmaking and they impart medical information as if reading from a textbook. Mildly entertaining, but without much verve or suspense.