Warning signs and a missed opportunity
The Great Sexual Liberation of the 60’s and 70’s, gave birth to lifestyles that were unimaginable in previous generations in terms of scale and scope. Correspondingly, a health care system with an established proven method of diagnoses and treatments of previous decades, was utterly overwhelmed and unable to cope when ‘mysterious new’ diseases began cropping up during the second half of the 20th century. A typical health care clinic of 60’s and 70’s, had a family doctor who was quite familiar with their patient’s medical histories, and more importantly, a sacred trust with their patient’s personal lifestyle’s disclosures. But what happens when infected patients, especially of bisexuals, are reluctant to disclose their sexual activities and disease symptoms with their personal family physicians? In any pandemic outbreak, it is vital for local, state and federal health authorities to have the most accurate clinical reports available, and if they are skewed, the consequences can be disastrous for disease management and containment….especially when a virulent pathogen has a critical timeframe and period. There were a handful of frontline doctors in places like New York City, who reported the unusual severity of venereal disease symptoms, and saw firsthand its initial bizarre mutations and the absolute necessity of monitoring and tracking.
The historical perspective
Mirko Grmek, the French physician and medical historian explained in his book “History of AIDS” that AIDS “is not a disease in the old sense of the word, inasmuch as the virus is immunopathogenic, that it affects the immune system and produces symptoms only through the expedient of opportunistic infection or malignancy. In the past, a disease was defined either by clinical symptoms or by pathological lesions, which are morphological changes in organs, tissues, or cells. Nothing of the sort, neither clinical symptoms nor lesions, observable by the old means, characterizes AIDS.” What Doctor Grmek was is fact trying to say, was that AIDS is nothing new at all…only the way and manner that biomedical researchers have coined it. Consequently, AIDS can be considered a medical novelty in as much as there are no existing criteria for it. Once patients are diagnosed with AIDS, they remain on the CDC lists forever..even if they are long term survivors. Continue reading ‘The Schizophrenic Metamorphic Nature of AIDS’ »