Educating Patients About HIV

To the Editor.—  Physicians should play a major role in patient education. Primary care physicians, however, may express little interest in educating patients about human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).¹ Although there is some information on the provision of education about acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) by general practitioners in Britain, there are few data in this regard about their colleagues in the United States. As part of a telephone survey of primary care physicians in Minnesota (in family medicine, general practice, and internal medicine), we asked questions designed to investigate this issue.A survey of short-answer, open-ended questions was administered to people from a random selection of offices. Small offices were considered to have one to five physicians and large offices to have more than five physicians.Responses were obtained from representatives of 83.4% (141/169) of physicians' offices contacted. Most nonresponses (15 of 28) occurred because a person able to respond