  We discuss the recent proposal by Thommen and Mandel (Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf
96}, 053601 (2006)) for electromagnetically induced negative refraction.
Although the main conclusion of the paper -- the possibility to achieve
negative refraction in an experimentally accessible atomic scheme -- remains
valid, we show that the weak-excitation approximation used is invalid in the
parameter regime studied and leads to quantitatively incorrect predictions. We
show that negative refraction is always accompanied by absorption rather than
by gain, and that the maximum value of the refraction-absorption ratio is of
order unity.
