DOCTORS OF INTEREST
JONATHAN TIMMES
King has a much different appearance after several treatments from Pierone.
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Treasure Coast Medical Report
week, while continuing to work as an infectious disease
consultant at Indian River Hospital, now Cleveland Clinic
Indian River Hospital.
“What I love and admire about Dr. Pierone,” King says, “is
that he was the first in my community to step up and say, ‘I
want to focus on this.’ He could have said, ‘I have a perfectly
good practice in a vacation destination, I don’t have to do
this,’ but he did.”
Pierone’s affiliation with Florida Community Health Center
grew and changed over the years.
Shortly after he began at the clinic, he teamed with two nurse
practitioners: Dorothy Bulgin, already employed at the clinic,
and Chandra Kantor, whom he hired. Together they formed the
core of the HIV medical staff. Kantor remembers her interview
with Pierone. “I said, ‘I don’t know much about HIV/AIDS,’
and Dr. Pierone replied, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll teach you.’”
FEW TRAINED
The clinic would quickly become well known among the
gay community and heterosexual HIV/AIDS patients. “There
was a high transmission rate of HIV in Fort Pierce,” says
Kantor. “It was one or two in the country for heterosexual
transmission.”
According to Pierone, “HIV was more a disease of poverty.
Our African-American patients were Haitians working in the
sugar industry, almost fifty-fifty male to female. And we were
seeing the full gamut of HIV, plenty of gay men, but also
those who’d gotten HIV through intravenous drug use.”
Bulgin remembers before Pierone started at the clinic. “At
that time there was no one really trained in HIV/AIDS work
in the area. I heard of Dr. Pierone and I went down to meet
him in Vero Beach.”
Then Pierone quickly became a known entity within the
AIDS community. “You would hear about Dr. Pierone,” says
Kantor. “That he was providing HIV care. So, you couldn’t go
to rallies or meetings without hearing his name.”
Kantor recalls the early days. “It was hard. Every day or
other day, people were dying. And some families rejected them
because they were gay or because of the stigma of the disease.”
The new HIV drugs would begin to make a difference
for some and take a toll for others. “At the time AZT did
more damage than good to some patients,” Bulgin says.
“Some decided not to take it because it made them so sick. I
attended quite a lot of funerals.”
In 1995, new administrators at Florida Community Health
Center decided to break up the clinic and distribute HIV
patients among the primary care providers. Pierone, Bulgin,
and Kantor thought it was the exact wrong thing to do.
As new medications became available, HIV morphed into
a specialty disease where knowledge of those medications
was critical, and dosing was complicated. Pierone, Kantor,
and Bulgin decided to leave the health center and open a
new medical facility, AIDS Research and Treatment Center
of the Treasure Coast, a non-profit clinic that survived and
thrived despite financial hurdles. “We ran the HIV clinic
on kind of a shoestring,” says Pierone. But the clinic’s vital
AIDS research and drug trials became a significant frontline
defense for patients affected with the disease. “We struggled
financially, but we never gave up. It was like living paycheck
to paycheck,” says Bulgin.
To help establish the new clinic and raise funds, Pierone
went out into the community and enlisted board members.
Citrus pioneer George Hamner was among the first on
the ARTCTC board. Vero resident Burton Lee had been
appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the President’s
Commission on the HIV Epidemic and was later White
House physician to President George H.W. Bush. Their
involvement helped ensure success.
Meanwhile, the FDA and drug companies began an
unprecedented drive to find new medicines to slow the
MARK S. KING
A “before” image of Mark S. King, an HIV/AIDS activist and blogger, who
has since been treated by Pierone for lipoatrophy.
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