5/29/2023 0 Comments Paul sax hiv![]() The language we once used seems not only unnecessary, but stigmatizing. ![]() “Shooter in 4 needs two sets of blood cultures.” Cringe.įast-forward to today, and I’m delighted to say that our teacher was onto something important by not wanting to label people with their disease. Alcoholic, IVDA (intravenous drug addict), chronic lunger, end-stage AIDS victim, schizophrenic, sickler, and on and on.Įven worse, these labels could come with a room or bed number. ![]() Our other teachers, and certainly the residents we looked up to, bandied about disease-first labels all the time. ![]() They’re people, not their diseases.Īt the time - the mid 1980s - this was not at all a commonly held view in medicine. He said the same was true for people with diabetes, or asthma, or anything. It wasn’t just for people with addictions. That’s the disease he has, not the person he is.” “He’s not an alcoholic,” he’d say, after we’d done an awkward medical student history and physical at a local inpatient detox center. One of his emphatic messages was to stop labeling people by their diseases. You know those stereotypes of Boston academic physicians with bow ties and tweeds? The opposite of that. A general internist with a specialty in addiction, he was a big bear of a guy sporting a ponytail, beard, open-necked shirts (sometimes of the Hawaiian variety) and beads. US Postal Service stamp, 2003.īack in my second year of medical school, my classmate and good friend John and I had a memorable teacher in our Introduction to Clinical Medicine course, someone we still talk about today.
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