DOCTORS OF INTEREST
The DUAL PRACTITIONER
Dr. Gerald Pierone of Vero Beach had a front-row seat
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to one of history’s most critical epidemics
in 1986.
It was the heart of New York City at Mount
Sinai Hospital, and Pierone was completing an infectious
disease fellowship when the AIDS epidemic exploded. As
daily patient counts climbed, Pierone and his colleagues
confronted an unprecedented disease with a stark mortality
rate and an unrelenting ferocity. Nearly 95 percent of those
infected were dead within two years.
“In those days we really didn’t have effective treatment,”
Pierone says. “You saw all these young men come in and they
would be dead within six months or a year. It was a really,
really tragic time.”
Today, Pierone divides his time between two distinct
medical disciplines, infectious disease treatment and
research, and aesthetic cosmetics. It might seem incongruous
that Pierone is both a member of the Infectious Disease
Society of America as well as a certified liquid facelift
specialist, but his medical proficiencies helped spawn one
world out of another. And his therapeutic treatments formed
INDIAN RIVER MAGAZINE
a nexus between the two.
His work with HIV/AIDS patients is now into its fourth
decade, indicating a doctor who wouldn’t give up the fight
to help arrest a virus and treat its underlying malignant
symptoms. Along that journey he learned techniques that
would help alleviate a disfiguring side effect from the drugs
that kept his patients alive.
Those techniques eventually led to Facial Rejuvenation, his
specialty cosmetics practice in Vero Beach where he utilizes
lasers, dermal fillers, and other cutting-edge aesthetics
treatments to beautify and enhance a youthful appearance.
AZT was the first antiretroviral drug used to combat the
AIDS virus. And as part of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group,
a National Institutes of Health network study, Pierone and
his colleagues at Mount Sinai did the first study to test the
efficacy of AZT versus a placebo.
SIDE EFFECTS
Later a combination “cocktail” of drugs, typically three
different medications taken in combination multiple times a
day, kept the virus in check. The drugs brought the first hope
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Infectious disease specialist Dr. Gerald Pierone talks with an assistant at his Facial Rejuvenation office. His aesthetics practice in Vero Beach grew out of
his work with HIV/AIDS patients.
BY MARY ANN KOENIG
Treasure Coast Medical Report