When alienated by past providers, LGBT patients are often reluctant to seek medical care

Despite overall strides in the attitudes toward people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender many argue that the medical community has lagged behind. In 2009, fewer than a quarter of 1 percent - .21 percent - of publications related to human health included an LGBT-related keyword, as indexed in PubMed, an online library of research abstracts run by the National Institutes of Health.

Yet researchers say that LGBT people are more likely to experience a variety of health problems 

 - from mental illness to drug abuse to sexually transmitted and other diseases - than their straight counterparts. The reason is largely that they don’t seek health care for fear of being stigmatized in the doctor’s office. Boston Globe