Dr. Greg Allen

Dr. Greg Allen, a retired doctor in family medicine, is an allied community member, who started his residency with Group Health in the 1980s. During this time, he saw many gay men with AIDS and later helped create an AIDS clinic in Seattle. He continued to help the LGBT community as a family medicine physician, while building his own family. Dr. Allen recounts the earliest days of AIDS in Seattle where treatments and tests did not exist, and then when AZT was available…a treatment that itself was very tough on his patients. He notes that many physical signs, like KS lesions or the wasting of the body, couldn’t be hidden and created assumptions of HIV status which resulted in many patients being abandoned or isolated in the gay community. Through the AIDS clinic, Dr. Allen has treated over 100 people with HIV, and feels that being a parent helped him look at things differently. And thankfully not everything ended in loss, as Dr. Allen recalls how the drug combinations that became available starting saving lives. This included a man he was told would die within weeks but who remained a patient of Dr. Allen’s throughout his practice…a patient he’s witnessed having many successes in his life.