While not every potential treatment is worthy of support, every patient's health is. If proven treatments were available which worked for the majority of patients, there would be little need to monitor unapproved remedies. But this is not yet the case. The more uncertainties a given treatment raises, the more important it is that the physician monitor its use. Patients will often be willing to follow a doctors best-supported recommendations if the doctor is willing to monitor the patient's other choices simultaneously.
Some physicians express fear that monitoring implies agreement.
There are no legal precedent s in AIDS in which a physician has been accused of malpractice for taking blood counts while a patient used a drug against his or her recommendation. It is not common, after all, for a doctor to deny care to a patient involved in recreational drug use or abuse, so there seems little basis for refusing to monitor use of a drug taken in the interests of healing. In most instances, patients will use a treatment anyway if determined to do so and the doctor is unable to sway them against it. Refusal to monitor diminishes a patient's confidence and actually may increase the risk of harm. Support the patient's goal of survival.