Rupert Whitaker: 'We have to see patients as people, not collections of diseases'
After 30 years of HIV treatment the co-founder of the Terrence Higgins Trust no longer thinks 'doctor knows best'
It's not often someone can say, "This is the culmination of my life's work," and mean it. Rarer still is someone whose "life's work" encompasses not just a distinguished academic and professional career, but 30-plus years of personal experience too.
But for Rupert Whitaker it is not merely doctoral qualifications (in psychiatry, neurology and immunology), post-doctoral fellowships (in HIV immunology and psychiatry), or even 15 or so years as a highly regarded specialist in behavioural medicine and chronic illness, that allows him to speak with authority on the way we define and practise medicine.
It's also the fact that his partner, Terry Higgins, was, in July 1982, one of the first people in Britain to die from Aids, leading to Whitaker – then still in his teens – co-founding the Terrence Higgins Trust, now Europe's largest HIV/Aids charity. And that for three decades now he has himself been living with HIV (and a few other illnesses too).
It is, by any standards, a fairly remarkable accumulation of knowledge and experience. "I've worn a number of hats in my life – academic, practitioner," admits Whitaker. "But it's bringing that together with my experience as a patient that's convinced me things have to change. We have to start seeing medicine in terms of what ill people need. We have to get away from the provider-centred approach that 'Doctor knows best.'"
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