During your regular life it is somewhat easy to cover up what you do to yourself physically. If you live in a cold enough climate you can always wear long sleeves or some other sort of disguise to conceal from prying eyes where you inject the drugs. Over time, and not very much time at that, the injection sites will become scarred and dark and obvious to people who know what they’re looking at. People who don’t know what they’re looking at will know that something is wrong and that will brand you as someone who has something going wrong with them selves. However if you go to the doctor and you want help then you simply must reveal your arms to the people who take your blood. And the people who take your blood have a very important role to play because it is their compassion or condemnation that determines whether or not an IV drug user will seek the help he or she needs in order to quit or in order to be healthier despite their bad habit. Kindness is vital for people who are in a position to look at what someone is hiding and make a comment.  Moreover while there is a doctor-patient confidentiality, there is no lab tech-patient confidentiality so even if a person is not required by law to keep this information to themselves I would encourage anyone who is in a position to see what other people cannot hide from them to please keep that confidence because one comment can make the difference between seeking help and dying of shame.