Teen Drug and HIV Screening at Doctor's Appointments

A trip to the doctor's office can always be so fun for some people...Screaming kids, little babies, shots, colds, flu, pneumonia, and swine flu are your everyday encounters at a pediatrician's office. But, it gets even better (not really). Now, the American Academy of Pediatrics is suggesting that doctors ask teenagers sixteen and older for HIV tests and questions about drug use. How much more awkward can a trip to the doctor's office get? Any community with over 0.1 percent HIV is being asked to test teens for the virus. This suggestion of these tests being performed at routine check-ups is not an original idea, but the support for it is inevitable. Drugs can affect the developing brains of teenagers, permanently damage them, and cause teens to acquire tolerances and addictions. So is this new approach that Mary Elizabeth Williams reports on a good idea? I personally think it is, especially for parents who are unable or unwilling to confront their kids on the issue. Having a doctor face the problem is an intermediate for facing these problems not from a parenting view, but a health view.

Mary Elizabeth Williams establishes her creditablitiy to both types of audiences of parents and teenagers in the Salon.com article "Should teens be screened for drug use?". She writes of her parent status and her fears for her own children establishing a pathos with the parent audience. However, she also writes of her past teen years and how these tests are what she calls "massive adolescent eye rolling" (Williams 5). In that sense, Williams is right, but she is also writing about a hard topic to reach teenagers on. The author writes about reports from the American Academy of Pediatrics and their proposals for this new policy along with Dr. Sharon Levy who is an author on a statement from this topic. The policy for asking about drug use and HIV testing at doctors is going to cause annoyance from teens everywhere.

Source: Williams, Mary Elizabeth. "Should teens be screened for drug use?." Salon.com 1 Nov. 2011: n. pag. Salon.com. Web. 3 Nov. 2011.