In 2006, the CDC recommended that HIV testing should be universal. Why aren’t doctors listening?
There are a variety of cited reasons, ranging from lack of reimbursement, concerns about informed consent, and availability of counseling.
The major reason however, is time. Primary care doctors are already inundated with numerous guidelines, including a variety of cancer screenings, as well as checks for diabetes and cholesterol. It’s been mentioned that if doctors performed every screening check on an panel of 2,500 patients, the average workday would stretch to 18 hours.
Something has to be left out, and that apparently, is HIV screening. It’s another reason why primary care needs to be reformed to focus on time and prevention.
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- Should doctors talk politics with patients?
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{ 4 comments }
Doctors knew all along it should be treated as a disease.
Government politicized the process, threw so many rules, regulations, forms, laws, hassles, then they wonder why doctors won’t touch it??
There are two other reasons why patients are not screened for it. First, if you ask them, many dont want the test. Secondly, many dont want to pay for the test. This is not just the patient but the managed care company as well.
I have been in this from the beginning. Fist in defiance of all common sense, the CDC said that it was not a risk to health care providers and that they should take no special precautions with AIDS patients.
Then they did a 180 and promoted universal precautions–including some of the same practices that they condemned people for taking initially.
When a blood test became available, they recommended extreme caution in using it and discouraged screening. The recommended extensive crippling informed consent procedures. HIV was an entitled virus. We could not test for it the way we could test for hepatitis or syphilis.
Now they want screening. They are closer to right this time probably, but really don’t have much credibility as an authoritative voice. It is first and foremost, like most other bodies writing guidelines, a political body.
Physicians are supposed to have enough training in science to review the literature and make their own judgements–not depend on “authorities” to tell them what is the right thing to do.
i screen most everyone for this, but i’m an ob..
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