The New Year Nitty-Gritty
- HIV and AIDS are back in
the gay communitymy communityour communities. I just. Don’t. Get it. Sex without protection, drugs, ignorance. I saw a young man in the ED awhile back with multiple risk factors who I’m almost sure had acute HIV infection syndrome even though his rapid test was negative and I just wanted to shake him and cry at the same time. I still scratch my head and wonder if there’s a way to support those with the disease without normalizing it so much that it just becomes another chronic illness and not worth protecting oneself from and educating oneself about. Sigh. A California law just went into effect yesterday (I’m told) so that written consents are no longer required for HIV testing. - Interesting Journal Articles from Cases Blog, plus some tips on how to stay current with the journals. “How do you eat in elephant? In small bites.”
I’ll add my own two pieces, both from The Annals of EM: Customer Satisfaction Versus Patient Safety: Have We Lost Our Way? and a really good overview of heart failure, management, and something one of my Cards fellows has ranted about for several years now–that there are diastolic failure ladies that go into pulmonary edema, and systolic failure guys that have more subacute weight gain. (Of course patients don’t read the textbooks, but the pathophys and treatment are different and are discussed well in the paper.)
Beautiful neuron drawings from Morbid Anatomy.- Welcome back, Kevin and goodbye, Medpundit. Like many, the latter was an inspiration to start a medical blog (since I disagreed with most of her health policy writing).
Hey Graham:
HNY.
I don’t get it either. Where did my generation fail your generation in HIV prevention and risk reduction education? I’m not being rhetorical, I really would like some ideas.
Here is the link to my World AIDS Day post:
http://randomthawghts.blogspot.com/2007/11/world-aids-day-december-1_28.html
I’m not tech savvy enough to know how to make this a single word link to take you there–sorry.
Is it because you’ve not had to watch your friends and/or partners literally waste away to skeletons and die agonizing deaths? Have HAART, Non-nukes, etc. access made contracting HIV too passe to be concerned about? It’s highly educated and intelligent young(er) gay men who are seroconverting. WHY?!The rate of infection in gay men >30 should be non-existent or negligible at best.