As I spend time this week with one of my dearest friends, a man who has been HIV-positive since at least 1987, and who has been on ARVs almost continuously since 1990, I am reminded that Affecteds have always had the option to consider alternatives to conventional pharmaceutical treatment. Last night we recalled some of […more]
Just a few days after news about Baby Rico broke among bloggers and other AIDS dissident outlets last week, AIDS researchers scrambled to find a way to push a very different story to the top of the corporate news chain this morning. “Baby Cured of AIDS” scream the headlines. No need to repeat all the […more]
After meeting with my orthomolecular doctor last month to update him on my current status, and to discuss the goals I hope to accomplish this year, I found myself sitting in a chair in the laboratory draw station, waiting for Brad, the phlebotomist, to prepare all the paperwork necessary for the long list of tests […more]
I am getting sicker by the minute, after reading a story of horrific abuse of power by the medical establishment that broke early this morning. Tragedy has stricken a newborn infant, being held in the hospital affiliated with the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota. A court ordered that Rico Martinez Nagel be removed from his […more]
I mentioned in my last post that I frequently get messages from people, asking about something I’ve shared, or sharing their own story. A few days ago, I received just such an email from a person I’ve never met, but who I’ve come to know fairly well online, and we continued the exchange through yesterday. […more]
Today is Valentine’s Day, and I am sitting in a motel room in Wichita, Kansas, pondering: how do I dare ask friends, family and strangers to give me money so I can continue to experiment with alternative health therapies? The painful answer is: I have no choice, but to try. I left KC at 4 […more]
During our last office visit a couple of months ago, the infectious disease specialist I am now seeing repeatedly referred to “The Guidelines”, as if they were some kind of Holy Grail for treating her patients. The guidelines she was referring to are actually several documents, published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human […more]
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.
I first learned of ultraviolet blood irradiation (UBI) a few months ago from a mutual friend. UBI is also known as extracorporeal photopheresis (ECP) in the medical literature, and most recently BioPhotonic Therapy and Photoluminescent Therapy. Photopheresis been around for more than a century, and started gaining attention in medical circles as early as 1902. Like many alternative protocols, the spectacular success of antibiotics to fight battle field infections in WWII captured the hearts and minds of physicians and started the West’s love affair with pharmaceutical solutions to disease.
Today, as best as I can tell, UBI is approved by the FDA for only two purposes: cutaneous t-cell lymphoma and graft-vs-host disease. It’s use is far more widespread in Europe, Russia, China and South America for a variety of conditions, though it is currently being studied in the U.S. as an alternative treatment or adjunctive treatment for malignancies, auto-immune disorders, and yes, AIDS.
UPDATE April 29,2012 This is a rewrite of a post I made almost two weeks ago. After exchanging a series of emails, followed by a more than hour-long sincere telephone conversation with JTD yesterday afternoon, I am now convinced that the comments posted below were not made by him. It is past time to end […more]