When Doctors Won’t Do the Job

New reports that a significant number of physicians and other health professionals across the nation are refusing to treat AIDS patients are a blow to efforts to contain the disease. With the general public sometimes awash in a sea of misimpression and uncertainty about AIDS, the picture of half an army of medical professionals in a full sprint of retreat can only add to the general unease and mythology.

Doctors are human, too--at least as a general rule--and they are permitted to have their fears and phobias. Up to a point. But when they refuse to serve the cause of medicine because of those fears, they tarnish their profession and remove themselves from the front lines of the battle against this horrible epidemic.

It is hardly necessary to insist that every doctor must accept as a patient anyone and everyone who requests treatment. There must be some latitude, of course. But it is wrong to refuse to serve an entire class of the unhealthy, and it sends the worst possible message to the general public.

Adequate precautions exist to enable a doctor or nurse to avoid contracting AIDS from a patient, and only a careless professional will fail to use them. What appears lacking now is more moral encouragement, especially from the medical societies and centers of medical learning, that would persuade, or prod, doctors to do their medical duty.

No doubt a substantial share of the reluctance is related not to medical reasons but to personal revulsion. Doctors may not like or approve of the sorts of behavior that is statistically correlated with contagion. But while certain kinds of sexual activity and intravenous drug use--two main causes of AIDS--may strike some as loathsome, rejection of that activity is no basis on which to deny medical care.

Physicians are entitled to know from their patients if they have AIDS so that proper precautions can be taken. But they are not entitled to shrink from the challenge, or claim they aren’t equipped to cope. As a recent stern warning from the National AIDS Commission phrased it, “It can no longer be acceptable for a physician or dentist to offer as an excuse: ‘I don’t have expertise in relation to this particular disease.’ They simply must acquire the expertise.”