CMHF’s crusade in enabling a Family Physician manage HIV-AIDS, is corroborated by Internal Medicine News, US of A. It is upto us practitioners, to take the challenge and start managing HIV-AIDS.

Team@CMHF

Thirty years after the first U.S. reports of pneumocystis pneumonia, a harbinger of the onslaught of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), primary care physicians find themselves again at the front lines of caring for patients with HIV/AIDS.

Like the illness itself, which has gone from a certain death sentence to a chronic disease, primary care practices evolved from first providing simple ministrations to the mostly untreatable to grappling with the specialized care needed for patients with active infectious disease, and the drug toxicities that go with their regimens.

Now, HIV/AIDS care has entered a different phase over the past decade or so, in which physicians need both specialized knowledge and basic primary care skills. They must simultaneously address patients’ complications from living longer with the disease, along with their psychosocial issues and age-related comorbidities.

But in the past 10 years, with HIV becoming a manageable chronic disease in this country, it is “not different in its acuity and time course from other chronic diseases that primary care doctors are used to taking care of,” he said.

Dr. Lee said she became known for her specialization and often received referrals from other physicians for HIV care because the drug regimens were so complicated. But now, it makes more sense for HIV/AIDS patients to get care from a family physician or internist, she said. Primary care physicians have specific training to manage chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and hypercholesterolemia, all of which are hitting HIV/AIDS patients hard.

“All of those things are things we are very well trained to care for. In fact, we are better trained than those specialists trained in infectious diseases,” Dr. Lee said.

Ref: http://www.internalmedicinenews.com/news/infectious-diseases/single-article/primary-care-takes-on-greater-role-in-hivaids/a96401a967.html