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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE September 18, 1992

CHOICE

You Still Have One...

Who selects the HIV/Care Home Infusion therapy provider?

Traditionally, the physician selects the provider or seeks assistance from the hospital's discharge planners.

Remember, all companies that provide home infusion are for-profit. They may be housed in a hospital, but they make money for that hospital, and your allegiance should be to yourself.

Choose your Home Care more carefully then you would car shop and with the same freedom of choice with which you choose your primary care physician. Research your options and tell your physician or discharge planner of your choice.

Critical items to ask any HIV care/Home IV company.

Does this company

have a national HIV program?

include an HIV-specific program on the local level? ● actively participate in clinical trials?

● have a Scientific Advisory Board of nationally renowned physicians to help create policies for patient care?

operate on the primary nurse model (this means that each patient is assigned one nurse to manage care as its goal)?

●have a dietician as part of it's HIV care team that makes home-visits to help prevent wasting and who will coordinate his/her knowledge with the primary care physician?

● offer respite care to you (a program that relieves primary caregiver with high-tech trained volunteer that is free to the patient/family)?

⚫ have its own in-house pharmacy?

⚫ have clean room technology, including hoods, ventilation and surgical clothing to help ensure a sterile product?

provide you with custom supplies, designed to help you carry out procedures efficiently?

● provide you with the latest in infusion control devices, such as IV pumps that fit into a pocket, allowing you to infuse while at work, bicycling or cooking...?

employ nurses skilled in IV therapy?

• provide 24-hour availability-through telephone or home visits

⚫ have skilled reimbursement specialists?

⚫ have a separate HIV Care Program Manager who helps coordinate all your needs?

compute it's cost on nursing and pharmaceutical $$$ and try to convince you it is less expensive because it is a no frills service?

If the company soliciting you answered "no" to all but the final question, the company is not Critical Care America.

If you answered yes to the last item, then assuredly, this company is not Critical Care America.

CHOOSE... YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF.

Critical Care

AMERICA

29299 Clemens Road, Suite 1K Westlake, Ohio 44145 216/871-1611 800-445-3019 Fax 216/871-4561

Honey J. Lazar, L.I.S.W.

HIV Care Program Manager

Think about This

by Mike Radice

So, who has the smaller one?

Contemporary American society's fascination with lesbians and gay men has leaked into the research labs of university biological scientists. Last year, the Plain Dealer reported on a highly publicized study conducted by Simon LeVay. LeVay reported discovering that a small portion of the brain's hypothalamus, the source of sexual urges, was smaller in the brains of gay men than those of heterosexual men. Last month, the Plain Dealer printed another study, conducted by Laura Allen and Roger Gorski, which reported that the structure of nerve cells connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain was larger in gay than heterosexual.men.

After spending years looking for a host of biochemical differences between gays and heteros (testosterone and estrogen levels, for example) and "coming up dry," there seems to be a shift toward looking at brain differences. The shift is only about two years old and has generated three highly publicized research studies. In 1990, D. F. Swabb found that the section of the brain which controls our daily rhythms was twice as large in gay versus heterosexual men. LeVay's 1991 hypothalamus study followed Swabb's and attracted tremendous newspaper, radio, and television talk-show coverage. Then, last month, Allen and Gorski's "hemispheric link" study received a chunk of mainstream media. Watch your local paper for more to follow.

So, are there really differences in the brains between gays and heteros? (And if so, who cares?... more on this question later.) Well, maybe in the dead ones, since only the brains of cadavers have been studied. After reading and analyzing these studies I discovered some serious flaws indicating that the "maybe" is closer to a "no."

First, the brains studied were from samples of cadavers labelled in a cavalier manner. The declaration of sexual orientation was based on statements found in the autopsy report regarding the orientation of the deceased. The researchers labeled the brains as "gay" only if the report indicated that the deceased had been gay. If there was no indication, the researchers assumed that the person had been heterosexual.

Now, I don't claim to be an expert on autopsy reports but I'd bet a chunk of change that there is no "check-off" system to label someone as "queer." A call to the Cuyahoga County Coroner's office verified my bet. Even if a coroner had to make a decision about the sexual orientation of the cadaver, the only way she could do it would be to ask the deceased's family and friends in an interview, and how many people would "out" their loved ones postmortem? Consequently, it stands to reason that these studies had some "closeted gay" brains mislabeled as "heterosexual." (The noticeably missing lesbians must have been in this group).

Assuming this to be true, then why did the "closeted" gay brains differ from their "outed" cousins? Obviously the difference wasn't due to sexual orientation, which was the assumption made by the research-

ers.

Second, the researchers admitted that "not all" of the gay brains differed from those of the heteros, and vice versa. I suppose one could argue that the "gaylooking" hetero brains were unidentified gay brains that looked liked the hetero brains. The nonconforming gay brains threw the "size difference" theory into question.

Third, the vast majority of the brains of the gay subjects, and a small number of the hetero subjects, were from people who had died from complications due to the AIDS virus. Various complications associated with the AIDS virus have been known to make changes in the brain, and these changes haven't been completely understood. Is it possible that the effect of the infections on the brains of the cadavers created an "illusion," making differences appear that didn't actually exist? The researchers attempted to address this question but ended up admitting that they didn't have a complete an-

swer.

Obviously it is impossible to determine whether or not there are differences in the brain structures of gay and hetero people based on these studies. The search for biological differences between gays and heteros came up dry again.

The next question is: "Why, in the first place, are researchers looking for biological differences between gays and heteros?" Being gay isn't a public health risk. It isn't a disorder. It isn't a disease. Even the psychiatrists gave up on it almost a decade and a half ago by making "being gay" officially normal. So why are these biological researchers continuing to spend so much time and money on this?

I located a big part of the answer in a commentary, published in the August 30, 1991 issue of Science, which addressed the current biological research in this area. The commentary's author, Dr. Marcia Barinaga, pleaded with her colleagues to ignore the complaints of homosexual civil rights activists and encouraged researchers to continue their search for "the cause of homosexuality." One of the activists' complaints, mentioned by Dr. Barinaga, included a concern over the findings being used to create a medical procedure to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals. Another was the findings' possible use as a means for mislabeling homosexuals as biologically abnormal.

If Dr. Barinaga is representative of others in her field, it appears many of our nation's biological scientists are continuing to research homosexuality using a "disease model": holding up the heterosexual male body as the standard by which to judge. Although the activists' complaints may seem Orwellian on the surface, they appear to address the biologists' seed of curiosity. I think that the researchers' time would be better spent finding a cure for things such as breast cancer and AIDS.▼

Next issue: "How many of us are out there?"

Mike Radice, a psychologist, currently works with the Cleveland Child Guidance Center and has a small private practice.

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