PrEP and the Judgment of Prevention.

Medicine sometimes fails to address social, economic, and political determinants of health. But how far beyond clinical encounters should intervention efforts extend? Because prevention efforts can marginalize patients by stigmatizing certain behaviors, interrogating the scope of medicine's prevention obligations is important. Additionally, it is important to distinguish clinician preferences regarding patients' personal behaviors (presumably based on clinicians' hopes for patients' positive health outcomes) from clinician biases expressed (consciously or unconsciously) about those behaviors. I illustrate the urgency of asking how far medicine should be expected to go to prevent disease by sharing how my own medical training has stoked my personal fear of acquiring HIV.