HIV and ID Observations

April 27th, 2014

Why ID/HIV Specialists Rank Last in MD Salaries

Here’s a figure from Medscape listing 2013 physician compensation: Now a median of $174,000/year is hardly chump change, so I don’t expect much in the way of sympathy on these data. On the other hand, someone has to to be last, and note that our income hasn’t increased a bit since the last time I commented […]

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April 8th, 2014

Would “HIV Controllers” Benefit from Antiretroviral Therapy?

Let me start with a disclosure — I’m the co-PI (along with Jon Li and Florencia Pereyra) on a study addressing the very question in the title. The reason for this post is that the topic has been the beneficiary of some terrific coverage in Nature Medicine, both of this research question specifically and the whole topic of […]

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March 29th, 2014

Opening Day ID Link-o-Rama

Several ID/HIV tidbits to keep you entertained until Sunday night’s opening “day” — for baseball that is. (I hear there’s some sort of basketball tournament going on as well.) Away we go! Female-to-female sexual transmission of HIV is extremely uncommon — though one such case was diagnosed at our hospital over 20 years ago — but this most recent report from Texas […]

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March 12th, 2014

Really Rapid Review — CROI 2014, Boston

Despite the winter that would never end, intrepid HIV/ID researchers and clinicians arrived in Boston for this year’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections –or more accurately, Conference on Retroviruses and Flaviviridae (little ID joke there) — which just finished last week. Not that it was easy — a winter storm roared eastward as the […]

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February 27th, 2014

CROI 2015 Dates Announced — And Warning, It’s Still Winter in Boston

From the CROI website: We are pleased to announce that CROI 2015 has been scheduled! Location: Seattle, WA, USA Dates: Monday, February 23 to Thursday, February 26, 2015 Details and schedules: Will be posted in early summer 2014 Love their exclamation point. Yahoo indeed! Kudos to the conference organizers for getting the dates out early this year. Meanwhile, […]

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February 13th, 2014

Jeter is Retiring, and Certain ID Doctors Are Getting Old(er)

It’s safe to say that most of the perspectives on Derek Jeter’s retiring from baseball will not be written by ID doctors, so let me seize the opportunity. And since it’s always risky to dwell on players from a certain team while living in Boston — I have friends for whom a central component of their […]

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December 24th, 2013

Brush with Greatness: John G. Bartlett

At the IDSA meeting in 2012, John Bartlett gave a lecture called, “Infectious Diseases Update for the HIV Provider” — what a great title — which was, as usual, information-packed, practical, well-referenced, and just plain fun. It also occurred to me at the time that there is probably no other person on the planet who […]

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November 27th, 2013

Gynecologists May Treat Men After All

Good news here for gynecologists who screen men for anal cancer: A professional group that certifies obstetrician-gynecologists reversed an earlier directive and said on Tuesday that its members were permitted to treat male patients for sexually transmitted infections and to screen men for anal cancer… It’s always impressive when a group swiftly reverses what is widely perceived […]

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November 23rd, 2013

OB/GYN Board Says Their Docs May Only Treat Women

Here’s a surprising move:  The American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology has decreed that gynecologists may only treat women. From the New York Times coverage: In September, the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology insisted that its members treat only women, with few exceptions, and identified the procedure [high-resolution anoscopy] in which Dr. Stier has expertise as […]

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November 13th, 2013

How Doctors, Nurses, and Other Medical Providers Spend Their Free Time

More absurd paperwork follies, this time from our friends at a mail-order pharmacy: Here, confronted with the challenge of refilling a patient’s HIV medications — which for the record he has been receiving unchanged for over 3 years — the pharmacy decides for the first time to reject the request and send the prescription back to […]

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