AIDS News Alerts
HIV misdiagnosis results in malpractice suit
An Ohio man’s lawsuit against a physician who had diagnosed him with AIDS and then prescribed AZT illustrates how careful clinicians should be when patients request AIDS treatment, an infectious disease specialist says.
In the Ohio case, Mark Savage alleges his former doctor had misdiagnosed him in July 1990 as having HIV, although he was never even tested for the virus. According to a Jan. 28 Associated Press report, Savage says he was treated with AZT and other AIDS-fighting drugs through 1996. Then in 1997, his new physician in Ohio ordered tests that showed Savage was not infected with the virus.
Physicians clearly should not treat a patient for HIV without first conducting tests to conclusively determine whether the patient is infected with the virus, says Tim Kuberski, MD, an infectious disease specialist in private practice in Glendale, AZ. Kuberski sees about 100 HIV-positive patients in his practice.
Kuberski will not treat new HIV patients without first receiving documentation that they are indeed HIV-positive.
First Kuberski screens patients for HIV antibodies, and then he confirms a positive result with the Western Blot test. "It’s almost impossible for a patient to have both of those tests be falsely positive," he says.
However, it’s possible that a patient who has some sort of psychiatric disorder will request a physician to prescribe AIDS drugs, even when the patient has not been tested for HIV, and this is why physicians need to be cautious and confirm all HIV cases.
"I’ve had a couple of patients who have come to me wanting treatment for HIV, but they were not HIV-positive," Kuberski says. "They come into the office, saying I’m HIV-positive, and I’ve been on such-and-such drugs.’"
Sometimes patients have even invented elaborate explanations for why they cannot produce documentation of their positive HIV test.
"They say it was done in a confidential setting, and they couldn’t get the results," Kuberski says. "Then I certainly get the confirmatory test done."
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