Services will be held Friday, Oct. 6 for Dr. Brady Allen, right, pictured here with his husband, Michael Layton. As we say farewwell to Dr. Allen, we pay tribute to him and other North Texas pioneers in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
Taffet@DallasVoice.com
On Friday, Oct. 6, we say good bye to Dr. Brady Allen, who passed away in July after a brief illness. His memorial service will be held at Cathedral of Hope at 5 p.m.
Allen completed his residency and went into practice in 1982 just as the AIDS crisis hit Texas. As one of the few doctors who treated people with HIV, he became a nationally-renowned expert in the field, and, over the years, he received many professional honors and awards.
The Dallas LGBTQ community honored him by naming him grand marshal, alongside Karen Estes, of the 2002 Alan Ross Texas Freedom Parade.
From the beginning of the epidemic in the early 1980s into the early 1990s, there were no treatments that could effectively control HIV. Physicians began using the antiretroviral AZT to fight the virus in early 1987, but the treatment was nearly as bad as the disease.
Still, new ways to treat opportunistic infections attacking the bodies of people with compromised immune systems were discovered and put to use, to keep those people alive. And those life-saving discoveries can be credited to the work of Dr. Brady Allen and others who began treating people living with HIV in the Dallas area.
Dr. Steven Pounders may be best remembered for treating Dallas Buyers Club creater and HIV patient Ron Woodroof. In the film of the same name, Pounders was portrayed by Jennifer Garner; the resemblance was questionable.
After beginning his career as a doctor at Parkland Hospital, Pounders joined Allen’s medical practice before branching off onto his own practice.
Dr. Susan Diamond and Dr. Nick Bellos in the early 1990s opened a practice in Dallas, Southwest Infectious Disease Associates, P.A., that specialized in treating people with HIV. Drug trials became a cornerstone of their practice.
After a more than 10-year hiatus from private practice, Bellos recently began seeing patients again in Dallas. Diamond moved to Israel in 2012 and now lives there on a kibbutz.
Dr. Jaime Vasquez was the fifth Oak Lawn-area HIV specialist. He, like Pounders, has since converted his practice to concierge medicine.
In Fort Worth, Dr. Patricia Wetzell was the go-to HIV specialist. At 31, she was the chief physician for HIV patients at John Peter Smith Hospital. She made national news in 1991 when she contracted the HIV virus through a needle stick that happened while she was treating one of her patients.
Three years later, Wetzell put her career on hold, fearing her weakened immune system wouldn’t resist illnesses to which she might be exposed. In 2002, she moved to San Antonio and joined the faculty of the UT Health Science Center. Today, she continues to practice medicine in El Paso.
Several other doctors in North Texas have been known for treating people living with HIV. Dr. David Donnell and Dr. Terry Watson practiced together in Oak Lawn. Dr. Louis Sloan went into practice at Baylor and became known for conducting drug trials. Sloan died in 2017, but his practice thrives.
When hospital visits became necessary for patients of these doctors, most people living with AIDS went to either Parkland Hospital or Baylor Hospital. The difference in care was astounding.
At Parkland on the AIDS floor, care varied from compassionate to terrible, but it’s the terrible that remains seared in the minds of anyone who witnessed medical care at its worst.
Meals for patients who were unable to get out of bed were often left on the floor outside the room. Rather than care for their patients, staff relied on friends of patients to change sheets and feed those patients. In 1988, the Dallas Gay Alliance — now the Dallas Gay and Lesbian Alliance — sued Parkland to force the hospital to provide needed medications.
In 1988 Dallas Gay Alliance sued Dallas County, which oversees Parkland Hospital, to protect the rights of people with AIDS to access health care. DGA accused Parkland of assigning only one full-time physician to handle the more that 700 AIDS patients the hospital was seeing each month, according to the Resource Center LGBT Collection in the University of North Texas LGBTQ Archives. Seven patients had died while awaiting treatment; “hospital beds were rationed and treatments for AIDS-related illnesses were arbitrarily denied,” according to the archives.
“Today,” the archives note, “Parkland is one of the largest providers of services to people living with HIV/AIDS in Dallas County, has an openly gay member of its board of managers and provides both domestic partner benefits and employment protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”
At Baylor Hospital back then, hospital management was never focused on providing the most loving care ever offered when they transferred any nurses suspected of being lesbian to the AIDS floor.
But even though that decision was likely based in discrimination and homophobia, it turned out to be a good decision. Because those nurses were wonderful. They made their patients as comfortable as possible and had more gay men die in their arms than should be expected of any nurse.
As a way of saying thank you, when Baylor Hospital disbanded its AIDS unit, many of those lesbians were fired.
The legacy AIDS physicians got little help from their medical colleagues, but they did get some assistance from the AIDS service organizations. The Nelson Tebedo Clinic, AIDS Outreach Center and a few others stepped up to provide HIV testing.
When Parkland decided to close its HIV dental clinic, Resource Center snapped up that program. Today Resource Center’s Dental Health Program for people with HIV thrives in expanded facilities on Forest Lane.
And when Parkland decided not to do pentamidine mist treatments to prevent people with HIV from contracting pneumocystis pneumonia, the Nelson Tebedo Clinic, another Resource Center program, acquired the compound, and nurse Penny Pickle administered the preventive medication.
Dr. Graeme Maclean, another pioneering HIV doctor in Dallas, who first prescribed aerosolized pentamidine for pneumocystis pneumonia, long before it had been approved for such use by the FDA. Maclean, who came to the U.S. in 1972 from Australia as a Fulbright Scolar, received his medical degree from Southwestern Medical School and completed an internship and residency at Methodist Medical Center then established his practice in Dallas in 1989. Besides treating patients with HIV, Maclean was known as an outspoken advocate for education surrounding HIV/AIDS and fighting against discrimination against those with the virus. Throughout his practice, before his death in February 2022, Maclean continued to perform research, participate in medical studies related to HIV and to lecture on the topic.
By the mid-1990s, more — and more effective — drugs were coming onto the market to manage HIV. In the two decades since, those drugs have become ever more effective and less toxic. And more doctors have begun treating people who have contracted the HIV virus.
As we prepare for Dr. Allen’s memorial service, we owe thanks to him and the other legacy doctors who treated thousands of members of our community through the depths of the AIDS crisis when there was little hope for persons living with AIDS through today where people living with HIV are expected to live a normal life span.
This article is not intended as an all-encompassing recap of the physicians and nurses who were there in the early days of the pandemic in North Texas. There is no way to name them all. This pays tribute to all the men and women who fought and continue to fight to bring an end to AIDS.
