Ethical issues of diagnosis and therapy in patients with HIV-AIDS and Tuberculosis

Like medicine, ethics is a practical discipline, which they acquire the knowledge of the general principles and skills to solve problems. Long term care involves both clinical and ethical issues in medicine. Effective medical education of long-suffering patients has to be focusing on increasing their adherence to treatment. The occurrence of AIDS pandemic has changed the physician’s way of thinking in terms of ethics in general, and in medicine in particular. HIV/AIDS has focused attention on deficiencies in the field of therapy, long care issues, medical training and education of the patients, as well as in deontology. The treatment of HIV infected patients with all new drugs discovered is not yet completely curative and the association of opportunistic infections, as tuberculosis (TB), is representing a permanent challenge for therapist.

Both ethical and medical training in general as regards AIDS and TB, should focus mainly on exposed people and learning through experience, to form skills that would make doctors to work with sensitivity in regard to sexuality, substance abuse, lack of treatment, relapses of disease and even death. In the same time, any ethical or cultural environment can enrich and support the real moral education of medical staff.

Medical ethics and ethics relating specifically to TB and HIV/AIDS, often meet highly complex problems. Alternative possibilities and decisions to take of what is right or wrong may create a real ethical, clinical and therapeutic dilemma.