AIDS and student attitudes.

When recently polled, one half of 4,100 physicians believed they had the right not to treat patients with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), and 15% said they would actually refuse to care for them. To assure medical care for the 365,000 AIDS patients projected for the US by 1992, it is imperative to know whether there is something unique about AIDS patients that produces aversion among physicians. We hypothesized that the desire to avoid AIDS patients derived from three fears: fear of contagion, homophobia, and a desire to avoid dying patients. To identify the extent to which these three fears affect the attitudes that students hold toward AIDS patients, we conducted three studies. In our first study, we discovered that students' views about a patient with a terminal illness are the same whether the illness is leukemia or AIDS. In the second study, we found that the patient's sexual preference was not the major reason students would avoid an AIDS patients. In a third study, we confirmed that fear of contagion is the principal cause of students' desire to avoid an AIDS patient. In the course of these studies, we found important differences between the attitudes of male and female students. Female students scored lower on the homophobic scale than male students, and they had less antipathy toward AIDS patients. Helping health care professionals understand their fears toward patients with AIDS will in the long run improve medical care. Since the origins of these fears are for the most part well hidden in our unconscious, dissemination of facts alone will not do the job. Interventions are needed to help health care professionals acknowledge and overcome their negative feelings about AIDS.