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Managing HIV/AIDS Therapy in Special Populations
Do caregivers face any special personal issues in treating patients with HIV/AIDS?
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Dr. Wohlfeiler (OC): To do this kind of medicine, you really have to have a kind of passion. It's not a really easy area of medicine. It's very scientifically demanding. Patients can be demanding. There are a lot of psychosocial issues to deal with, and I think that unless you have some kind of passion for taking care of this patient population, and dealing with this disease, I think it would be very tough to stick with it. I think it would drain someone. To be honest, there's an associate that we hired a year ago, and today's his last day, because he thought he would really love this, and he can't stand it. I think for all of those reasons, it's a lot of work, and it's a lot of-it can be very tough emotionally. I think that unless this is in your soul, that it's what you want to do, I think it's very hard to do.
I've been doing this for 15 years, and if things hadn't gotten better with the advent of really effective drugs, I'm not sure that I would still be doing this, because it had gotten to a point that it had really started to-all of the death was really starting to impact me, and was very hard. Because of the nature of this illness, you see your patients a lot, and you develop a very close relationship with most of them, and then ultimately end up losing all of them, which is what used to happen, was really, really tough, and after about six years of doing this, I had gotten to a point that I wasn't sure I was going to be able to hang in there anymore. Thankfully, right at that point protease inhibitors came out, and I was able to give people good news for the first time. It really kind of allowed me to continue to do this, but it's a tough area of medicine. I find that people who are in HIV medicine, and have been in it for a long time, and have stuck it out are really passionate about what they do, and that's one of the things I love about this area. I think we have a lot more passion than dermatologists.
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