(image courtesy of The Ethical Nag)

Just how much are physicians influenced by pharmaceutical reps bearing gifts? It’s a question recently posed in this report on Medscape, based on posts at a physician-only discussion group.

The original question seems simple enough: “Are you influenced by the ads on paper and pens?” It was asked by a family physician in a recent posting on Medscape’s Physician Connect (MPC).

What follows are several indignant responses from fellow physicians about how they could not be bought with coffee mugs or pens, “or any other gift worth only pennies at best.”

Others disagree, and the doctors debate the relative merit of the current system, with some of them acknowledging that they rely on Pharma for their continuing education:

Still other physicians argue that there is a benefit to having drug reps visit the office with samples and gifts. A urologist says, “Shutting your doors to the pharma world is limiting your exposure to new meds, new applications of old meds, and the changing patterns of insurance coverage.”

A general practitioner agrees, “How [else] would you make yourself aware of new drugs that have arrived on the scene? Read the ads in journals? Where would you get the details you need to know about the drug? How long would it take before you became aware of what’s new? When you have a question about a drug, if there were no samples and no package inserts to view, what resource would you use?”

The cost for this pharma-funded continuing education delivered to the front door of physicians’ practices?

Indeed, a meta-analysis published in JAMA in 2000 found that the estimated $8000-$13,000 spent per year on each physician does affect prescribing and professional behavior.^[1] A small study published in the International Journal of Health Services in 2009 suggested that patients, too, are aware of the pharmaceutical gifts that doctors receive.^[2] Furthermore, researchers found that patients’ approval of gifts was related to the perceived value of the gift to patients as well as its monetary value.

Eight to 13 thousand dollars, per physician, per year?   That’s a lot of pens and coffee mugs.

Articles like these reinforce for me that what is being called “health care” in the United States is nothing more than “medicine peddling”. Medical training for doctors is all about… well, medicine, which is not the same thing as health. So why are doctors referred to as “health care providers” when their training and practice is so limited and narrow?

If you need a drug, visit your doctor. If you need help improving your health, find a healer. Hint: they are not listed in your “health” insurance provider directory.

Startling similarities when comparing micrographs of budding HIV and budding HERVs.

Could it be that we are getting closer to a (more) unified alternative explanation for what causes “AIDS”?  There are several recently published articles, as well as conversations between the authors, that just may prove to be the impetus for such a epiphany.

This is not about some startling new discovery.  It is the work of lay people wading through the scientific literature and gleaning and assembling already documented knowledge and information in ways that most orthodox scientists simply seem incapable of doing.

Most recently, Liam Scheff has published another great piece of writing, How AIDS Didn’t Become a Kissing Disease, which further challenges the mainstream explanation for AIDS.

In the article, Scheff presents official government definitions for what retroviruses are as he wanders through the history of “HIV”.  He notes  Matthew Gonda’s discovery of “HIV” in the saliva of healthy and ill gay men in the 1980s, though no self-respecting AIDS risk reduction educator today would suggest that HIV can be transmitted by kissing or even oral sex.  Gonda incidentally co-authored scientific articles with the now discredited discoverer of HTLVIII/LAV/HIV, Robert Gallo.

The article concludes that what Gallo and others were seeing are actually Human endogenous retroviruses, or HERVs; self-made cellular messengers that our bodies create in reaction to stressors and toxins, the same way scientists create them in the lab.  Scheff suggests that nutritional responses can suppress the expression of HERVs.

Other writers have written about issues of gut dysfunction and exposure to toxins that are entirely compatible with the theory that HIV is a HERV.  What remains to be done, in my personal opinion, is to tie these various perspectives together and to present a unified alternative theory of AIDS that can be understood by a fifth grader.

Until that happens, those readers who are struggling to understand the significance of a positive test result owe it to themselves to read the collection of writings by Schell and Cal Crilly at reducetheburden.org, as well as the essential and related information contained in Tony Lance’s paper, Gay Related Intestinal Dysbiosis.  It really isn’t that difficult to make the connections for oneself, but it does take some time and effort and for most people, it also requires some de-programming to allow the mind to accept new information.

As an Affected gay man, I struggle mightily to explain what I’ve learned to friends and others who find themselves in a similar situation.  That job is nigh-impossible as long as people remain uninformed and in the dark.  When I worked for the New-Telegraph in the 1980s and 1990s, the masthead read:  “Knowledge is Power”.  Nothing could be truer today.

Some folks seem to be so deeply mired in the world of AIDS that they are unable to rise above their peer-reviewed journals and view the world as a big picture.  This tunnel vision allows them to overlook, if not protest, all of the contradictions that are ever more likely to show up in the online media.

Reports like this one from the Journal of Medical Case Reports, via Medscape.  A 28-year-old Polish woman presented at a hospital with respiratory problems, rash and ulcerations, among other things.  Doctors were ready to presumptively diagnose “Human immunodeficiency virus seroconversion syndrome complicated by Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia” until a PCR test result came back negative.

The actual disease?  Measles!  I didn’t write the headline:  Measles Mimicking HIV Seroconversion Syndrome: A Case Report, a peer reviewed journal editor determined that from reading the research.

In this case, the misdiagnosis was caught in a modern European hospital, but what would the outcome have been in a less developed part of the world, or even in a rural or community medical clinic with less capability?

Then there is this Reuters report about a supposedly deadly link between salmonella and HIV in Africa.  That’s right, the bacteria typically responsible for food poisoning and the lethal HI virus.  According to this report, researchers are puzzled to discover that HIV-positive people with salmonella did not have a suppressed immune system, but rather an excess of antibodies to salmonella.

“It’s quite a surprise and it suggests that what we are dealing with here is more of a consequence of an immune disregulation as opposed to an immune deficiency per se,” said lead researcher Cal MacLennan of the University of Birmingham.

MacLennan’s  comment is spot-on consistent with the views of Dr. Heinrich Kremer, author of The Silent Revolution in Cancer and AIDS Medicine.  Kremer is a qualified and outspoken opponent of the use of anti-retroviral drugs and a critic of the HIV theory of causation of AIDS.

I approach scientific research as a layperson.  My interest is in taking the pulse of the current state of science, as presented in the media, including, but not limited to peer-reviewed journals.  My area of interest is obviously AIDS, which I have been intimately involved with since it was called GRID.

It doesn’t take a lot of research to find these reports.  Contradiction after contradiction parade across my screen these days, courtesy of Google Reader.  Inconsistent information about AIDS was also the norm in the 1980s and 90s, when the current mainstream theory was being manufactured by the virologists.

I simple share some of the more obvious contradictions here occasionally, as well as at QuestioningAIDS and then leave it to others to draw whatever conclusions they can from this litany of inconsistencies, particularly as it pertains to AIDS.

What is almost amusing is how some of the more rabid AIDS apologists protest my posts about these questions.  It’s kind of flattering to imagine they feel threatened, but I just don’t understand why anyone would think science is immune to contradictions. Historically, contradiction has been one of the essential engines for scientific advances.

Recently, published reports from various scientific fields offer new insight about possible ways the human immune system wards off disease, specifically those conditions blamed on viruses, such as AIDS and hepatitis.

For starters, the latest word from atrociously well-funded AIDS researchers is that they’ve discovered the secret to defeating the HI virus by studying elite controllers (ECs), those people who test positive for HIV antibodies but never get sick, at least not according to any of the major AIDS theories.

As virologists, these scientists at MIT ultimately base their research and subsequent findings on assumptions established using the original faulty research of the now-discredited “co-discoverer” of HIV, Robert Gallo.  According to them, ECs have a genetic trait that causes them to create “super t-cells” that can defeat HIV and other viruses, such as Hep C.

Glia cell in cell culture from neonatal mouse brain, green: glia cell, red: peroxisome. (Courtesy of Max-Planck-Institute for experimental medicine, Goettingen, Germany)

Meanwhile, across town at Children’s Hospital Boston, less well known molecular and cellular biologists are busy performing research that continues to throw cold water on  Virology’s notion that t-cells are the key to fighting viral infections in the first place.  According to them, organelles inside the cell known as peroxisomes can detect virus invasion signals and launch a limited antiviral offensive. Other organelles, the mitochondria, follow up with a more definitive antiviral counterattack.

Even the headlines for these very different explanations for stopping viral infections tell a story.  Virologists are “finding secrets” to “mysterious viruses” while the cellular biologists report “mild-mannered helpers” of the immune system.  While mild mannered may not sound nearly so dazzling as secretive and mysterious, this research being conducted at a community hospital sounds exciting.

What is a poor layperson like myself to think of these very different explanations for how our immune systems work?  I may be out of my league to try to analyze these kinds of research reports too finely, but it shouldn’t take a rocket scientist (or a virologist or a molecular biologist) to realize that “Science” has not conclusively defined the process by which these supposedly lethal viruses kill.

Add this new information to the huge questions of what viruses actually are, where they come from and what they do, as articulated by Janine Roberts in her book Fear of the Invisible, for example, and the basis for skepticism grows exponentially.  Roberts reports on the body of research conducted by cellular biologists purporting that at least some viruses—retroviruses, in particular—may actually be cellular messengers that are manufactured by our body’s cell.  These are called endogenous viruses and every human being is chock full of them for good reasons.

Reading these various accounts of what is going on in the world of Science recently has led me to think that we just might soon be reading about a significant and newsworthy breakthrough very soon.  I hope that isn’t just my personal optimism working overtime.

I also read the tea leaves of published accounts by the AIDS industry and it appears that they, too, see the writing on the wall of the demise of the ‘HIV=AIDS, unless you take the expensive and toxic drugs for the rest of your life’ meme.

The line between the terms “HIV” and “AIDS” have been blurred since the beginning of the epidemic, resulting in lengthy and convoluted treatises that attempt to explain how AIDS is not a disease, but rather a syndrome of diseases, yet the treatment of choice is one-size-fits-all.  More recently, AIDS is becoming even more blurred as public health policy makers (and grant seekers) now lump it in with malaria, tuberculosis and other viral diseases like hepatitis.  This appears to me to be a rather transparent attempt to keep funding within the AIDS establishment, rather than refocusing the commitment to fight long standing epidemics of actual diseases that can be cured and prevented without drugs.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that the work of cellular biologists will soon result in a new way of viewing illness from diseases like these in the very near future.  This new view will hopefully be heeded and will result in a shift of our scarce public funding resources from “fighting sneaky viruses” to working to eliminate the common contributing factors of malnutrition, poverty, lack of sanitation and clean water and drug abuse.

Then again, maybe what I’m feeling is simply optimism, rather than intuition.

11+ years of viral load testing

I continue to monitor my CD4 and viral load for a number of reasons that make sense to me, and as a result I can graph the last 11+ years of these numbers.

I have updated these graphs and posted them here so others can see how wildly variable these numbers can be.

According to the mainstream HIV/AIDS theory, if viral activity is UP, the number of CD4 immune system cells should go down. That is certainly not the case with my numbers.

More significantly, these laboratory markers do not track with my actual health. For example, my CD4 count increased both times I was hospitalized for DVT blood clots.  Conversely, some of my worst medical conditions, such as severe neuropathy and measurable brain inflammation, occurred while my viral load was at or near “undetectable” levels and CD4 counts were double what they’ve been the past several years.

When my most recent counts came back a few days ago, my viral load had more than tripled from the last count six months ago, and was nearly 10 times its level 9 months ago.  It is more than double the next highest count during the last 11 years, including at least a couple of “blips” (unexplained spikes in viral load that are either insignificant, or warnings of impending disaster, depending on who one listens to).

CD4 counts fluctuate wildly

At the same time, my CD4 count and CD4 % had both increased, an event which completely contradicts the mainstream explanation of “how AIDS works”.

Because my doctor (a board-certified “HIV-Specialist”) runs his own labs in-house, I wondered if this aberration could be a lab error, so I requested that he order new tests from an outside lab, such as LabCorp or Quest Diagnosics.  I also wondered if the recent Bell’s palsy might be affecting the test results.

Here is my doctor’s response:

Presently, the major indicators for starting HIV therapy is the CD4# not the viral load. We use to consider that to some degree but the CD4 count is the overriding factor for the disease.

I do not think it is necessary to redraw the test since the CD4 count is the major determinant and as that is OK, you are fine. I would not recommend any change in our treatment plan at present.

-Doc

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. We are apparently back to 1985 in terms of how we monitor immune system performance and possible disease progression.

I cannot challenge him further without leaving his practice (a distinct possibility), but one has to ask:  what is the goal of HAART (Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy), if not to reduce viral load to “undetectable”?

Why are thousands of people, especially gay men here in the U.S.  and Europe, being terrorized into taking ARV drugs based on these test results?

Doc can say what he wants, but the conventional wisdom being pounded in the heads of gay men via the media, community-based AIDS organizations, and mass marketing campaigns, is that the overriding objective for anyone testing “poz” is an undetectable viral load.

My doctor is an enigma, but in some ways I’m lucky. How many other doctors would be screaming at me to (re)start the drugs based solely on this test result?  I personally know of two of them, because I walked away from them when they tried doing exactly that.

I am disappointed though that he isn’t as interested as I am in ruling out the possibility of a faulty test, or other explanation for this latest “blip” in my viral load results.  I wasn’t asking to retest in order to consider taking HAART again.  It will take a lot more than a single test result to drive me back to that hell.  I simply wanted to verify the test result for my records.

I actually agree with and applaud Doc’s opinion that I not make “any change in our treatment plan at present”, because “our” treatment plan is to to nothing other than try to live as healthfully as possible… without pharmaceutical drugs.

Personally, I think Doc is tired of seeing his patients die of simultaneous, multiple organ failure.  I’d like to think that as much as we butt heads sometimes, some part of him is grateful to have even a few patients remain free of the common ailments affecting people on HAART.

It is his inability to see the flaws in his rationale that drives me nuts. I just want to shake him by the shoulders in the hopes he might wake up from his trance and join the rest of us in speaking out and speaking up about the anomalies (I am being kind by using that word) of the HIV/AIDS theory, as it is currently being practiced in the West.

It is the same tunnel-vision that that researchers in SF and other cities are using to try to justify mass drugging of “pozzies”, regardless of their overall health.  This makes no sense if viral load is not a critical measure of the level of “HIV activity”.

I do have to say that my appreciation for and support of those Affected dissidents who choose not to monitor these counts only grows each time I get my results.  They make a very good argument that getting distracted with markers that are not very meaningful can actually cause poor health.  I believe it.  Despite everything I’ve learned and know by now, I have to admit that when I first saw that spike on my chart, I felt as if I had been kicked in the gut.

It was just such a spike the caused me to restart HAART the second time in 2002 for eight months before quitting them for good.

The psychological toll of tracking a disease that is supposedly lethal is enough to make one ill.  It takes incredible  effort and energy to challenge the contradictions and inconsistencies of an entire industry created around this constructed and manmade disease that isn’t really a disease at all.  Unfortunately, the alternative is to passively accept ridiculous answers that include a lifetime of chemotherapy with combinations of toxic drugs.

Thanks, but no thanks.

I have made the mistake of making treatment decisions based on these lab results in past, and do not intend to repeat that mistake.  Still, I’m afraid that I have been tracking these numbers too long to stop now.  Like most options in life, there is rarely one “right” answer as to what is the best path to travel.  I have chosen this one and will continue to follow it, at least for now.

Children run to play in DDT fog used to control mosquitos.  (menswork.us)

My health problems are supposedly due to a virus, and I’m beginning to think that just might be the case, but before anyone jumps to conclusions, let me explain.

The word virus has been in use for more than six centuries, though the first infectious pathogen to be named as one—the tobacco mosaic virus—was discovered only in 1898.

So, what was being referred to by the word “virus” for centuries before that time?

The word virus originally meant toxin or poison in Latin. Knowing that helps me postulate how those kinds of viruses—i.e. toxins and poisons—might play a role in causing poor health in certain groups of people.

As Michael and I were driving to breakfast the other day, one of the Saturday morning talk shows on NPR was joking about mosquitoes in Madison.  My mind flashes back to days of my youth, growing up on a farm near the (ahem) wholesome, rural farming community of Colby, Kansas, on the arid High Plains of the United States.

Normally, one thinks of mosquitoes as a problem for tropical locales, and I’m sure they are, but we had mosquitoes in the land of the Dust Bowl, too.  Colby’s city fathers  had zero tolerance for whatever minimal mosquito population would arise every summer, because I distinctly recall the novelty of the mosquito fogging trucks that would roam the streets in the early evening, blanketing the entire town with an acrid smoke.

We didn’t use mosquito foggers on the farm when I was growing up, and truth be told, I don’t remember swatting mosquitoes very often.  Horse flies were another matter.  Come to think of it, we had fireflies too, which I rarely see anymore.

It was while I was a kid visiting townies that I encountered the fogger, rolling slowly down the residential streets after supper, spewing their thick fog.  I remember riding our bikes, or chasing each other in the fog for “fun”.  Hey, kids can be stupid, and I was no exception.  In my defense, we were led to think the fog—lethal to bugs—was harmless to us humans.

Kids in South Korea playing in the fog.

I don’t know now what was being sprayed then, but I do remember being told that the insecticide was distributed in a base of diesel fuel, so I suspect it was a thermal fogger.  I can’t rule out that it did not contain DDT, a commonly used insecticide which was banned in the U.S. in 1972.  Whatever it was, it made the back of my throat burn and my eyes water.

Insecticides were only one of the poisons I grew up with on the farm.   Our water source was a well that drew from the Ogallala aquifer, a huge underground basin that covers eight states and that to this day still contains fossil water from the time of the last glaciations.   This ancient water is mixed and replenished with surface water percolating through the soil, carrying whatever chemicals the farmers above have put on their fields down with it into the aquifer.

At the time of my youth, Atrazine was one of the most commonly used herbicides in that part of the country, an area that was known as the largest producer of winter wheat in the world.  More recently, irrigation has expanded the variety of crops that can be grown there to include corn and soybeans, both crops that require even more intensive chemical pest control.

Atrazine was first made available commercially when I was only three years old in 1959.  For more than a decade before we moved to town, the chemical was percolating through the soil and into the aquifer, only to be drawn back up as drinking water on the farm.  Moving to town gained us “city-water”, which was stored in enormous water towers, but was drawn from the same aquifer source.

Exposure to even miniscule levels of Atrazine causes a host of human illnesses, prenatal problems, gender disturbances in fetuses and may even be a major culprit in the recent demise of bees known as colony collapse disorder.  It is some nasty stuff.

© Budda | Dreamstime.com

The barns and sheds on our farms and those of our neighbors were filled with heavy bags,  5-gallon cans and 55-gallon drums of herbicides to be spread across the land.  We breathed them.  We ate them.  We drank them.

Still under my father’s tutelage, once our family moved to town to operate a small inn, I began learning how to remodel and renovate old buildings.  I don’t know how many times I removed asbestos laden materials as part of demolition projects.

Another event that I still recall is stumbling out of an enclosed space after nearly asphyxiating myself by spraying an epoxy paint in a shower.

As an adult, I continued to operate a remodeling business and my workspaces and basement were filled with more cans of solvents, paints, strippers and chemicals with labels that specified these products’ VOC.  I didn’t know what VOCs (volatile organic compounds) were then, but don’t let the word organic fool you.  These are harmful and immune disruptive substances too.

All of these exposures to harmful chemicals—or “viruses”—were unintentional, for the most part.  Stupid in hindsight, perhaps, but unintentional.

I also indulged in optional abusive toxins recreationally, injecting what was called “crystal” in my late teens.  I’m not sure if this is the same drug by that name that today’s youth are dabbling with or not.  I was told it was a form of speed.  I also snorted a bit of coke and toked weed for years.  Fortunately for me the abuse of white powder lasted less than a year.

I smoked cigarettes and chewed tobacco for more than 25 years.  Heavily.  The best thing I have ever done to improve my health and feel better was quitting all tobacco products on March 13, 2001, my dad’s birthday one year after he died.

Finally, there is a history of excessive pharmaceutical drugs for many years.  Even before testing “positive” on Gallo’s polyreactive test for common (or at least not unique) antibody proteins, I was experiencing illnesses that were treated with strong antibiotics, like Flagyl.  After starting on AIDS chemotherapy in 1998, I quickly advanced through an increasingly heavy burden of prescription drugs until I was taking more than two dozen of them simultaneously in 2006.

Those are just the known exposures to toxins and poisons that I can remember now.  There are other possible suspects that may well contribute to my poor health.

The Perth Group proposes that, in addition to illicit drug use, the oxidative stress resulting from repeated exposure to semen is a sufficient explanation for the immune failure in sexually active gay men that has come to be known as AIDS.  I’ll spare you the details, but I meet the criteria above.

Besides the toxic substances I’ve highlighted above, like most modern Americans, I am a product of a consumer culture that is in love with chemicals, food additives and the by-products of a consumer society.  While I now try to avoid overly processed foods, those boxes of manufactured food-like substances were part of my daily diet for years.  I am a recovering Royal Crown Cola addict as well.

I see a lot of illness around me, in my family, and among my friends and neighbors.  In my own extended family there are people with cancer, MS, Down’s Syndrome, fibromyalgia and gawd knows what other chronic diseases often associated with an immune system overwhelmed by toxins.

Toxin disease is one of accumulation.  Some of us acquire more toxins more regularly and more often than others, but no one is free of them.  We are also designed to process and eliminate toxins, so there is infinite variety among us in terms of capacity and capability to do that work.

With each passing year of my recovery, which I started in earnest in 2007, these and other events of my past surface and reinforce for me the notion that I do not need a mysterious, sneaky pathogen whose questionable isolation experiment has never been repeated, to explain my poor health and weakened immune system.

Recalling these past events and exposures also help point me to what I believe is a reasonable approach to restoring my health to whatever extent is now possible:  reduce exposure to new toxins; eliminate accumulated toxins; heal cellular damage and restore and balance an overwhelmed and dysfunctional immune system.

My experience with the modern medical system is that it tries to treat every problem with prescription drugs, which are usually toxic themselves.  That so many are prefaced with the word “anti” is telling:  antibiotics, antidepressants, anticoagulant, antiretrovirals, etc.  They are often based on a principle of killing another life form, or suppressing a biological function or system.  That there so few, if any  “pro” or positive drugs in the pharmacy speaks volumes about the mindset of modern pharmacology.

If the word virus actually means toxins, and if prescription drugs are typically toxins in one form or another, why not start referring to pharmaceutical drugs as “viruses”?

And remind me again: why are we taking them trying to curing every little ill?

Tony Lance

I’ve gotten to know Tony Lance personally the last few months. The more we visit, the more things we seem to discover we share in common.

Both of us are gay men who came out just before, or in the very earliest years of the Gay Plague.

We are both “poz” and living without taking any antiretroviral (ARV) drugs.  We are both dissidents from the mainstream theory of AIDS.

Each of us has a history of writing and editing.

We make our own home made sauerkraut to help boost our gut health. We are interested in beekeeping, though Tony is much farther along in that adventure than I am.

I got to know Tony better after he agreed join the new QuestioningAIDS team earlier this year.  QA has quickly become one of the top-ranked AIDS dissident websites, with a very active dissident discussion forum.

At the RethinkingAIDS 2009 conference last fall (which I was unable to attend), Tony presented his hypothesis that the immune failure known as “AIDS” in the gay male community may actually be caused by damage to the intestinal flora due to common sexual and hygiene practices, such as rectal douching and the use of some sexual lubricants, as well as the high rate of antibiotic abuse in some subsets of gay men.

Though I had previously read Tony’s  paper GRID: Gay Related Intestinal Dysbiosis, I had not heard some aspects of his personal story, until I viewed recently posted videos of his presentation.If you can’t tell by now, I really like Tony and think highly of how he thinks, writes and now I’ve discovered that I like the way he speaks in the videos below.

I’m posting all three videos  here because I believe it is important to reach other gay men about some of the potentially dangerous practices that we are not hearing about from the AIDS service organizations in our communities.  In our personal conversations, Tony and I have also agreed that it is important and urgent for those of us “affected” by the illness to take leading roles in the AIDS dissidence movement.

Thank you Tony, for being willing to overcome your personal discomfort to become such an articulate and visible spokesperson for all of us.

(Note: The PowerPoint slides are available in a PDF format here.)

courtesy of freefoto.com

AIDS researchers continue to stretch the limits in finding excuses to spend some of the billions of dollars worth of funding being made available to them. Lately, the anti-smoking forces have been rallying to compete for a piece of the HIV research pie.

This morning’s news brought this “study” about the lung damage caused by smoking to my attention.  Apparently “HIV-positive” are three times more likely to smoke cigarettes than the average population.  The research was published in the PubMed approved, peer-reviewed journal AIDS Research and Therapy.

The study’s conclusions, published as a provisional article:

Cumulative cigarette consumption was associated with worse lung function; however the loss of %FEV1 did not accelerate in HIV-positive population compared to the general population. Current smokers had higher odds of respiratory symptoms than non-smokers, while former smokers had the same odds of respiratory symptoms as non-smokers. Cigarette consumption was likely associated with more COPD cases in HIV-positive population; however more participants and longer follow up would be needed to estimate the effect of smoking on COPD development. Effective smoking cessation strategies are required for HIV-positive subjects.

Key points:

• Smokers have worse lung function than non-smokers
• The lung function of former smokers is about the same as non-smokers.
• Being “HIV-positive” makes no difference in these findings.
• “HIV-positives” would benefit from quitting smoking.
• Send more money for us to study this phenomenon further.

Duh.

As a moderator at the forums at Questioning AIDS, I often read personal accounts of poz people being put on ARVs after presenting to their doctors or a hospital with respiratory distress.  Inevitably, these folks are presumptively diagnosed with pneumocystis pneumonia, an “AIDS-defining” infection, without any confirmatory testing.

If it is true that poz people are three times as likely to smoke, then is it a no-brainer that this group is going to be far more likely to present with respiratory illnesses, such as pneumonia or lung cancer.  Heck, in the bizarre world of HIV, smoking is even blamed for causing dementia.

In 2006, another peer reviewed study reported that smoking alone may actually be an independent risk factor for testing “positive”.

My initial takeaway from this undoubtedly expensive study is that if you have tested positive on the Gallo polyreactive protein test (aka the “AIDS” test), and you are trying to remain healthy without resorting to a lifetime of chemotherapy, quit smoking immediately.  While you’re at it, quit all recreational drugs, including alcohol; eliminate all environmental toxins around you; eliminate processed foods and refined sugar from your diet; and incorporate as many other common sense healthy practices into your life as you possibly can.

One of the earliest actions I took when I started addressing my own health problems was to quit smoking cigarettes.  I even remember the date:  March 13, 2001, my father’s birthday the year after he died of COPD.

I didn’t need a research study to tell me it was the right thing to do if I wanted to improve my health.

Have you ever wondered how I can stand being needled sometimes?

Or perhaps you think I have a prickly personality?

Need more proof that I have thick skin?

This is my third acupuncture treatment for Bell’s palsy. I’m an old hand at acupuncture and have utilized it for more than 10 years now.

An acupuncture treatment always leaves me feeling much better.  It is great for reducing my stress.

I call acupuncture “enforced meditation”.  It helps those of us who find it difficult to remain still and quiet long enough to calm our minds if there are a dozen or so needles stuck in us.

It is disconcerting for me to see my left eye roll up until only the white is showing. From my point of view, both eyes are closed. I don’t realize that I’m not blinking or closing my left eye until I see a video of myself.

My acupuncturist is Chris Powell, of Boulevard Yoga and Healing Arts (formerly Missouri Acupuncture). Chris has helped me through some rough spots over the years.

Thanks man!

After self-diagnosing my symptoms, I was reluctant to seek any medical care, mainly because there really is no successful treatment or cure for BP.  Most people recover on their own in a few weeks to months.

However, because of my medical history I do think it is important to document any unusual symptoms or experiences, and BP is unusual, so I called my primary care provider, who is also a “HIV” specialist.  His office staff would not even make an appointment for me, telling me to go to an emergency room instead.

Within 30 seconds the ER doc pronounced “Bell’s Palsy”.  There was no need to further examination to rule out a stroke or TIA.  Because I had told him about the injury with the car door, he did order a cat scan of my head.

Prior to prescribing any treatment, the ER doctor called the doctor who refused to see me in the first place and based on that consultation, prescribed prednisone and informed me that he was certain that the Bell’s Palsy was the result of my “HIV”.

These are words I would never have heard if I were able to hide my HIV-status from health care providers.  Once they know you are poz, they need not consider any other possible explanations for health problems.

The cause of Bell’s palsy in most people is unknown.  Recent scientific studies have called into question the prevailing belief that it is caused by a virus.

“The results cast doubt on previous hypotheses suggesting herpes simplex as the cause of Bell’s palsy,” Lockhart and colleagues said, suggesting that researchers should look elsewhere for the condition’s cause.

John Gever, Senior Editor, MedPage Today

That BP can be caused by physical trauma is not questioned.  I don’t know how a cat scan can rule out damage to a nerve passing though a bone in my skull, but maybe a medical professional could enlighten me.

To see more funny pictures, just watch my youtube video about today’s experience: