"HIV/AIDS therapy - where are the facts?"
AIDS appeared at the beginning of the 80s as a “new syndrome”. The “new diseases” were PCP and Kaposi’s sarcoma. The relatively young patients were consistently homosexuals, who admitted to drug abuse. The original drugs-AIDS hypothesis was rejected in favor of the virus-AIDS hypothesis. The HIV-antibody test came on the market and turned all those who tested positive to these antibodies into potential AIDS victims. The “plague” spread henceforth more due to the plague-like spread of the HIV test than to that of the clinically ill.
The drug AZT was approved in 1987 and was, as we now know, given in too high a dosage, so that practically everyone who received the medicine died prematurely of myelosuppression.
This extreme mortality rate did not at first occur to us clinicians because we believed that the patients were dying of AIDS.
Only after a clear reduction in dosage and the addition of a new active ingredient (protease inhibitors) did the mortality rate begin to go down.
The acceptance of the Virus-AIDS hypothesis has lead to patients being handled primarily on the basis of their HIV status, irrespective of clinical disease. In many cases, ancillary treatment is additionally applied to existing diseases, which can lead to a significant over-treatment. Furthermore, completely healthy HIV positive patients are advised to submit to prophylactic treatment and lifelong chemotherapy is recommended.
This “guideline therapy” has not been verified by random, placebo-controlled long-term studies and is, therefore, unsuitable as a recommended course of therapy. In fact, HIV positive patients should be treated commensurate to their clinical disease.
The occasional successful treatment of chronically ill HIV positives, who mostly suffer from invasive mycoses (PCP, Cryptococcus meningitis, histoplasmosis), stem from the antimychotic effectivity of the protease inhibitors which, in combination with nucleoside analogues, form a potent antimychotic agent and are possibly superior to other antimychotics such as amphotherycin combined with Ancotyl.
Further studies in the treatment of invasive mycoses would be necessary to ascertain which therapy regimen can best be tolerated in the long run. This is, however, not possible without calling into question the Virus-AIDS hypothesis which is clearly impossible, as recent incidents show. (Censure of two scientific publications which contradict the prevailing view of the cause of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.)