It should be unnecessary to say that addressing the social and mental consequences of living with such medication-toxicities as lipodystrophy etc. lies outside physicians' expertise, yet even in the so-called flagship clinics, the services have been and continue to be physician-centred and inadequate to address these realities. Therefore, people with HIV do what they can to soothe themselves, which

So what is a vision for the future in the post-96 world of HIV? Let's look at the concept of health This is the definition created in 1959 by the World Health Organization. For anyone with experience of clinical HIV services in the UK, it's clear that such services treat the virus, not people and their health. In order to deliver real health-outcomes, any service for people with so-called chronic,

As I said earlier, the AIDS Service Organisations created the template for services to people with HIV, which have been extremely successful. These included a significant degree of participation in medical services, not just as actively engaged patients, but also in the organisation and delivery of those services. This was resisted at first by the physician-profession until there was clearly no point

Other factors involved in such failures have been the nature of the globalisation of treatment activism, including the involvement of international bodies such as the World Trade Organisation, the UN, etc., and the relative loss of political leverage in dealing with bodies that are not answerable to the electorate. They are therefore rather immune to the effects of political shame.On the international

One of the principles of the civil response to AIDS was that there was a balance between rights, privacy, and dignity on the one hand, and the needs of society in controlling the spread of the disease on the other. This was achieved through legal action and political pressure, including direct action, notably by ACT-UP. The saddest part of the current situation is that these principles are also the