Florida: Doctors Recommend HIV Testing for Everyone

Health care professionals should include routine HIV testing for all patients within their practices, HIV/AIDS experts told more than 130 doctors and health care workers gathered in response to a community needs assessment in Sarasota. The conference was sponsored by the Manatee and Sarasota county health departments.

Dr. Jeffery A. Beal, clinical director of the Florida/Caribbean AIDS Education and Training Center and a University of South Florida professor, encouraged the group to make taking a sexual history a standard part of routine medical care. This should include open-ended questions that allow doctors to identify symptoms or behaviors that put people at risk. "We are missing opportunities to find people early," said Beal.

Beal said he is most concerned about two groups often not considered to be at risk for HIV -- seniors and adolescents. Eleven percent of positive HIV tests are among seniors, he said.

Health care professionals can help pave the way for frank discussions of sexual behavior with patients, said Marilyn K. Volker, a clinical sexologist who helped found the state's first community-based AIDS project in 1982. The daughter of a minister, Volker said that while she understands people's hesitancy in discussing sex, protecting one's body is paramount.

Helping people take care of themselves requires a setting that promotes trust, sharing and confidence, Volker added. "I would rather shock patients than have them get infected or re-infected because of a lack of information or testing," she said. Taking a patient's sexual history, Volker underscored, must be nonjudgmental and open to allowing people to ask questions or express their concerns.

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