3610625

pubmed:Citation

3

http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Americas, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Behavior, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Bioethics and Professional Ethics, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Delivery Of Health Care, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Developed Countries, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Developing Countries, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Diseases, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/EPIDEMICS, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/ETHICS, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Economic Factors, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Health, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Health Care and Public Health, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Health Personnel, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Hiv Infections, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/North America, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Northern America, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/PHYSICIAN-PATIENT RELATIONS, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Philosophical Overview, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Physicians, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Professional Patient Relationship, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Psychosocial Factors, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Socioeconomic Factors, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/United States, http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/keyword/Viral Diseases

http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/journal/0410447

MEDLINE

0093-0334

Print

NLM

16-20

KIE: Zuger describes her education in medical ethics during her residency on the AIDS wards of New York City's Bellevue Hospital. She believes that, while AIDS "is well on its way to becoming a medically orthodox disease," the ethical difficulties the disease creates for doctors will continue to grow. Zuger hopes that an examination of some of the dilemmas encountered by her and her colleagues during their medical training will help other physicians who have yet to treat their first AIDS patient. Among the issues she discusses is whether a physician can ethically refuse to care for a person with AIDS., PIP: AIDS is well on its way to becoming a medically orthodox disease, pathogenesis determined and etiology defined; in the next 5 years the technology of AIDS diagnosis and treatment will become increasingly sure and sophisticated. But the ethical tangles surrounding the disease have only grown, an will continue to do so. The purpose of this essay is not to review the ethical issues that commonly occur in the care of patients with AIDS. Most of these "patient-oriented" decisions, difficult though they are, stay on familiar ground. Other issues, though, have been largely ignored in these discussions. These are the "physician-oriented" ethical issues--more difficult than the others perhaps only because physicians are less accustomed to discussing them, or admitting they exist. But by now, probably no physician in the US can honestly deny considering them. Is a physician ethically obliged to care for a patient with AIDS? What does the care of these patients do to the physician's training, practice, and quality of life? The tendency has been to ascribe physicians' reluctance to care for patients with AIDS exclusively to fear of infection with the AIDS virus. In fact, this fear is only one, and possibly the least important of the difficulties that have confounded medical residents in caring for these patients. These needy, time-consuming patients are all to frequently patients that many physicians have inherent difficulty in accepting. Dislike of homosexuals--still the largest category of patients--is as common in hospitals as anywhere else. Drug addicts--the other large category of patients--are notoriously unpopular patients on hospital wards. What determines how residents will react to an onslaught of patients with AIDS is very hard to say. Whether they will be weakened or strengthened probably depends more on individual makeup than anything else.

1987

Journal Article