Doctor Instills Confidence in Clinic’s AIDS Patients

Talk to anyone affected by AIDS in Ventura County and you’ll probably hear a story about Dr. John G. Prichard, head of the county’s immunology clinic.

A clinic patient who did not want his full name used recalls the time he came down with acute anemia because of the drugs he was taking for his HIV infection. Prichard joined him at the hospital.

“In the emergency room, Dr. Prichard leaned over me and said, ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with you, but I’m going to find out,’ ” recalled the patient, who is 50. “You can go for miles with that sort of confidence.”

Prichard (pronounced pri-SHARD) probably has more experience treating AIDS and the HIV virus than any other physician in Ventura County. The immunology clinic opened only 18 months ago, but Prichard has treated AIDS since 1981, when the county’s first case was diagnosed. Since then, he has come into contact with most of the 160 people diagnosed with AIDS in the county.

Bobby, a 35-year-old Ventura man who has had AIDS for two years, sees a private physician but has referred several friends, especially indigent ones, to Prichard. But he recalls one referral who was well off financially and had insurance.

“I said to Dr. Prichard, ‘I got a patient for you, a private-pay patient who has some money.’ Prichard says, ‘we like money.’

“But that was kind of a joke. His attitude is, ‘Hey, we got a weird disease here and we’re not going to say no to anybody.’ ”

Prichard, 45, came to Ventura County Medical Center in 1978 as a resident physician from University of California, Irvine.

“Even as a resident, he could adequately teach practicing physicians several years his senior,” said Dr. Richard Ashby, the hospital’s director of physician services.

In the mid-1980s, Prichard spent two years in Houston, where he helped establish a department of family medicine at Baylor University Medical Center. In Houston, which was a regional treatment center for AIDS, the sheer volume of cases gave him a new perspective on the disease.

“I had tremendous exposure to patients in all phases of the illness,” Prichard said.

“It’s difficult in several respects,” he said. “The way it is spread, and the fact that almost everyone in the process of spreading it doesn’t know it because there are no symptoms.”

The period between infection with the AIDS virus and development of symptoms--as much as 10 years by some estimates--”makes containment by usual public health methods impossible,” Prichard said.

In 1988, Prichard came back to Ventura with his wife, Lorraine, and their two children. Again he went to work at Ventura County Medical Center.

“He came back in a unique position, as director of internal medicine without having been trained as an internist,” Ashby said, adding that it illustrates the confidence fellow physicians have in Prichard.

During Prichard’s two-year absence, AIDS cases in the county had increased from 16 in 1986 to 38 in 1988. He quickly pushed for creation of the immunology clinic, which opened in July, 1989.

Supervisor Maggie Erickson recalled that officials initially were worried that the clinic might attract people from outside the county, but she doesn’t believe that has happened.

“It’s meeting the needs of patients before they are so serious that it costs a great deal,” she said.

In fact, county records show that the clinic had a profit of $3,661 in the first five months of the current fiscal year, thanks to volunteer staffing for some tasks and reimbursements from insurance companies.

“He’s very efficient at keeping costs down,” Dr. Larry Dodds, the county’s director of public health, said of Prichard. “He knows the best test to figure out what you need.”