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.
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.
Each patient fell into one of three groups: <350 CD4 cells/muL; 351-499; and >500. This last group would be considered “normal” according to AIDS.gov, which lists the range for CD4 counts as 500-1000. Yet, according to this study, this group of so-called “healthy” patients were almost one and a half times more likely to experience a drug-related adverse effect.
The report reinforces another point that I find I must continue to drive home over and over again, and that is the definition of “low CD4 counts”.
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]
Courtesy Library of Congress I pledged a few months ago that I wasn’t going to give him any more attention, but AIDS drug cheerleader J Todd DeShong has outdone himself recently by declaring that intravenous vitamin C is more toxic and dangerous than the antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) used to treat “HIV”. I can’t resist exposing […more]
Oh, the irony. While surfing the poz.com website this morning, I clicked on a link to their sister site, aidsmeds.com and got this warning from my computer’s anti-virus program: For the record: I do believe it is a good idea to practice safer-surfing practices and to always use protection online.