Clinic Doctor Criticized for Not Treating HIV Patient : Health care: Activists plan to picket the office and complain to the state medical board. The physician has resigned.

AIDS activists on Thursday denounced a Ventura physician who refused to treat an HIV-positive patient when he came to an urgent-care clinic with a cut on his hand.

Dr. Thelma Reich has since resigned, clinic officials said, because she would not comply with their policy to treat everyone. But the activists say they will vent their outrage during a protest today in front of the Ventura Urgent Care & Family Planning clinic on Ralston Street.

They will also call on the California Medical Board to take action against Reich and the clinic, and they hope to elicit an official apology from clinic officials, said David Enos, a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP.

“We want to inform the medical professionals out there who do not treat HIV patients every day that they have a responsibility to become informed and not continue this sort of discrimination,” Enos said.

The incident was triggered Feb. 14 when Salvador Fuentes cut his hand as he was washing a wineglass.

Fuentes, 30, a former Ventura technician who now has AIDS, said the cut was not deep enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room, so he decided to seek treatment at the urgent-care center.

Before going to the clinic, he said, he called once to ask for directions and a second time to inquire if there would be a problem because of his HIV-positive status.

“That was my main concern. I didn’t want to waste time going somewhere that I might have problems,” Fuentes said. The human immunodeficiency virus is the precursor to acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

A nurse at the clinic guaranteed him that there was no policy against treating people who were either HIV-positive or had AIDS. But when he arrived, Reich refused to stitch up his wound, he said. She told him that treating an AIDS patient could jeopardize the health of her staff and patients, he said.

“I was in shock, I just couldn’t believe it,” Fuentes said. “I was discriminated against because I have AIDS. It is on the same level as if she had told me she wouldn’t treat me because I was Mexican.”

Fuentes insisted that Reich put her refusal in writing, which she did on a clinic prescription pad. “This is to inform you that I do not treat patient with HIV positive in our clinic. Advised to go to county ER (emergency room) for treatment,” she wrote.

Fuentes then asked a friend to take him to the emergency room at the Ventura County Medical Center, where a physician closed the cut with four stitches, he said.

Attorneys from the Western Law Center for the Handicapped and the American Civil Liberties Union said they will file a civil rights discrimination lawsuit today in a Los Angeles federal district court based on that note.

Reich’s refusal to treat Fuentes solely because of his HIV positive status is a violation of federal and California discrimination laws, said Western Law Center attorney Sande Pond.

The practice also violates the 1992 Americans with Disabilities Act, Pond said. “That law says you cannot discriminate on the basis of a disability, and the law is very clear that being HIV positive or having AIDS is a disability.”

Roger Cogan, director of legal services for the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center of Los Angeles, agreed with Pond. “What we have here is a clear-cut case of discrimination,” he said.

“We hope this lawsuit sends a message to the many physicians out there who refuse to treat people with HIV and tells them that they are not only violating their ethical duty, but also the law,” Cogan said.

While the refusal to provide care was unethical, said Dr. Richard Ikeda, the chief medical consultant for the California Medical Board, Reich’s actions broke no laws.

“What it revolves on is whether there was a prior doctor-patient relationship, and whether there was any abandonment here,” Ikeda said.

“If that answer is yes, then there should be sanctions, but it does not appear there was. In the long tradition of medicine being a healing, caring profession, this kind of behavior is certainly unethical,” Ikeda said.

Fuentes also questioned Reich’s ethics. “Here’s a doctor who went to school to learn to treat people, and then she turns down the opportunity to help me because I have AIDS.”

Reich did not return repeated phone messages Thursday.

Pond is seeking an injunction against Reich from discriminating against AIDS patients as well as damages for Fuentes’ trouble.

A Ventura Urgent Care official said Thursday that he regretted that Reich did not treat Fuentes and insisted that the clinic is open to all.

“The management of Ventura (Urgent) Care & Family Practice wishes to make it clear that it is not now, nor has it ever been, our policy to withhold treatment from persons who are HIV positive,” said administrator Phil Berger.

“All of our staff members have been advised of this policy,” and Reich was the only one of the clinic’s 15 medical employees who refused to adhere to it, Berger said.