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Gay Related Intestinal Dysbiosis (GRID): the video

Byjonathan
 
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.)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6PTiNW7AQc]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkLu0gm5GDY]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGMOzjR421o]

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.

Wait... there's more!

  • 97

    97. That’s my latest CD4+ count, less than half the count from six weeks ago.

    That’s it. I have tried as many alternative treatments as I can think of to reverse the decline. I will be starting my third round of pharmaceutical ARVs as soon as I can get a prescription and fill it.

    This decision has been a long time coming, and in hindsight, I probably should have restarted a few months ago. There’s nothing magical about 97, or being below 100, but it’s as good a breaking point as any. I’ve long argued that there are two things to keep in mind about CD4 counts: one is the long-term trend; the other is single- or low double-digit counts.

  • Reduce AIDS drug toxicity and side effects

    I embarked on my third course of ARVs since 1998. For ten of the sixteen years I have been HIV-positive, I was able to manage well enough without ARVs and I continue to believe there is no reason for otherwise healthy HIV-positive—let alone negative—gay men to take these drugs. To those who want to wave a recent study about the benefits of early intervention in my face, I would ask them why they put so much faith in a science that has utterly failed us to date.

  • Retreat and Adventure — Midwest Men’s Festival

    When I received my HIV diagnosis in 1998, I withdrew from my community of gay men. I “went to ground”, thinking that isolation was the only safe place to avoid being criticized for seroconverting at such a late date, when we were all supposed to know better.

    This past week has been yet another bifurcation point in my life. I returned to a community I have known about, if not been a steady part of, for more than 30 years. A community of men whom I could touch and hug. Men whose tears might wet my face and whose body heat and life forces I could feel in ways that can only happen in person. It really did feel like coming home.

  • The truth about Truvada: PrEP won’t stop AIDS

    I’m willing to grant that gay men are entitled to use PrEP… provided they have access to all the information they need to make an informed decision. Informed consent has been a hallmark of the HIV and AIDS research and prevention efforts for three decades, and that shouldn’t be waived for the campaign favoring PrEP.

    Gay men deserve to know that all the claims for Truvada reducing the risk of acquiring HIV-positivity  are based on trials—funded by Gilead—that emphasized the importance of using condoms…

3 Comments

  1. I saw the end of Tony’s Presentation after being interviewed by “somebody” at the conference it was a hectic weekend. I caught the end of it and it made sense, however I knew there would be footage and I could review it all from the beginning at a later time. This may be some info I could bring up in a video project I am working on. Thanks for Posting this.

    Reply

  2. OK, this intestinal dysbiosis theory of AIDS is promising as a plausible answer to critics of Rethinking AIDS who ask: OK, then what does cause AIDS?

    We have lots of reasons to suspect that HIV is not the cause, starting with Occam and Koch and Duesberg and Bauer, but still there is ill health and death in some similar patterns. What are the real reasons? It looks complex and not well explored.

    Could we have, please, a “Patients Like Me” community and record our own experience with analyzing and correlating symptoms, treatments, and results? Such an association would expose all the participants to ridicule and harassment so we have to have a way to control that.

    What have the various Patients Like Me groups done? Are there better ways to minimize ill effects of sharing experience while still learning as fast as possible?

    We have the tools to build complex understandings by careful construction of good questions and multiple answers to each of them. We could use community wikis deliberately designed to foster comparison of different conclusions, for example, we could use an argumentation systems such as those described in “Dialogue Mapping”. (See IBIS, QuestMap, and Compendium for three generations of argumentation tools.)

    You two have shown us some valuable ideas. What would be a good next small step to take toward making effective use of those ideas to save us, your readers and fans, from suffering ill health and premature death? Can we make any progress among ourselves toward improving our health and our lives? You can predict my answer.

    Richard

    Reply

  3. When a person is in a consciousness of “not self” the immune system is compromised. A simple remedy and self healing strategy is to be and live in a consciousness of “self”. Be who you are. Be true to yourself. Express your authentic self. Accept and love the person you are.

    Reply

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