There. I hope I’ve addressed your question. I am not well. I have never been well. But I continue to function.
I still do not see the correlation between HIV and my health; only a correlation in increased medical problems when I am taking the ARVs.
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.
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…
What troubles me is the apparent willingness of an entire community to consider embracing Truvada as some sort of symbol of sexual freedom… evidenced by charges that those of us who are skeptical are guilty of being sex-negative and “slut-shaming”.
All of this on the basis of research that has been manipulated and twisted by Gilead to create a false reality of safety.
I’m resigned to the fact that Truvada as PrEP is here, regardless of what I or others fear. Now it’s mostly a question of time to see it PrEP meets the expectations of sexually active gay men…. and Gilead shareholders. The former is yet to be proven; the latter is a foregone conclusion.
John McNair, a musician and a philosopher from Perth, Australia, is something of a counter-cultural role model. McNair has created a very wide-ranging collection of podcast interviews with people who might get overlooked in the larger, mainstream media. I met John on Facebook a few years ago and we quickly established a rapport with each other. Last week […more]
We cannot afford to exclude from our conversations people who hold different points of view than ourselves, as was becoming the norm for the RA Facebook group. It is enough that we agree to question, challenge and really “rethink” the mainstream theory that a new, sneaky pathogen that defies electron microscopy for detection suddenly burst forth in Africa and gay men in the West, causing this new disease that is really a collection of old rarely seen diseases.
The questions about whether or not HIV exists, or is capable of causing AIDS remain. AIDS “rethinkers” had better get used to the idea that dissidents have—not surprisingly—failed to prove a negative.
Elizabeth Ely (pronounced ē-lē) has served in the past as Rethinking AIDS’ “Public Relations” coordinator, and is a frequent co-host with RA President David Crowe on the How Positive Are You? podcasts. Ely has frequently spoken out as a representative of Rethinking AIDS and its policies on the group’s Facebook page.
The long time member and Administrator of Rethinking AIDS’ Facebook group manifested some sort of bizarre public mental or psychological meltdown yesterday. I don’t know how else to describe it. She started the day by posting vague and mysterious messages, warning of impending doom so dire that she was considering “leaving the movement.”
Last November I wrote about the outcome of my willingness to step outside my personal comfort zone to engage with a former nemesis, J Todd DeShong. When we both lowered our personal shields and allowed civil dialogue to occur, we discovered we had far more in common than we had differences. Those differences that remain did not have to […more]
Frankly, in the end, I really, really don’t care what causes AIDS. I just want people to stop suffering and dying from whatever it is. It appalls me deeply that after all the hundreds of billions of dollars in research — possibly more than that spent on researching all other microbes combined — HIV research has ‘succeeded’ only in giving patients the horrifying choice between either dying slowly of Opportunistic Infections associated with a damaged immune system, or dying slowly of Liver Failure or having your skin peel off or maybe a Heart Attack caused by HIV drugs themselves. All the while ignoring the patients who do just fine for rather a long time when left to pursue their lives unmolested. So pick your death.
-Carl Stryg
In the simplest possible summation, Leibowitch has been treating HIV-positive patients with traditional ARV cocktails, called HAART. Where he leaves the path of traditional treatment guidelines is that once a patient is “stabilised”—meaning they have achieved respectably high CD4 counts, and their viral load is undetectable for six months—Leibowitch starts reducing the number of days per week that a patient takes these drugs, to as little as twice per week.