We were partners. By the early 1990s, the two were attending policy meetings and scientific conferences together. The tag-team approach is now standard for AIDS doctors and activists deciding policy and funding. An awful lot of stuff goes on outside of medicine where doctors and patients need a partnership. There's no other disease in medicine where doctors and patients have worked together like this.
Most ID docs are much more flexible, much more responsive.
This might be the first true manifestation of the essence of the doctor-patient relationship. Garey Lambert died of AIDS in 1996. But sometimes it forces people to transcend common barriers and confront new challenges in a compressed time frame. Garey rose to the occasion.