After two exams this morning and before preparing for another tomorrow, I was able to attend this panel-style lecture on the impact of HIV featuring Dr. Teresa Long and Dr. Michael Para as they both recall their early encounters with the disease and what they learned from it.  Both were very involved in public education of what the disease was, and dealing with afflicted patients.  They recounted that the darkest part of the epidemic surrounded the fact that the people dying were very young, and at the beginning there really was nothing to be done, while another difficult part was how the epidemic was politicized and stigmatized.

It was interesting to hear that even in the early 1980s, physicians and other hospital staff did not deem it necessary to wear gloves or masks.  The HIV epidemic quickly changed this when many hospitals started turning away patients who could have the disease, while many people with the disease were left to die alone in hospitals that would take them.  People were stigmatized based on sexual orientation, being a hemophiliac, and even being an immigrant, because all were claimed to perpetrators in the popular media.  It was mentioned that the Wexner was the only hospital to accept HIV positive patients for quite a time, and the physicians talked about how eerie, and even scary, the 11th floor was for many people because this is where these patients were kept.

Although many afflicted were stigmatized, activism became very prevalent, with activists attending lectures, booing Reagan when he refused to talk about the epidemic, and so forth.  Those people were able to work closely with public health officials, and its interesting to see that they played quite a large role in slowing the public health emergency.  The lecture went on to establish that these two physicians believed that patient care is only about taking care of the patient, on both a micro and macro level, and that medicine isn’t about being on the clock, but about trying to solve a problem with the patient.  Although these are both important takeaways, the most impactful thing discussed was that currently, HIV is more about preventative healthcare, alongside many prevalent chronic illnesses in the United States, but no one wants to be an activist for preventative medicine, and this can become a major public health problem.