The Impact of the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome on Medical Residency Training

Abstract

In the past five years, the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) has proved to be a devastating and as yet incurable illness. My own introduction to the syndrome came in 1982, when I was a third-year medical student on my initial rotation in internal medicine. On the previous evening, our team had admitted a young homosexual man with a bizarre history of progressive wasting, fevers, shortness of breath, and new infiltrates on a chest film. My attending physician, having recently read reports of a new (as yet unnamed) syndrome,1 , 2 noted that "this thing is changing the way we practice medicine."Now, . . .