AZT
Dean
Almost everyone in the AIDS research community now admits that the megadoses of Ziduvodine (AZT) that were given to early AIDS patients in the 1980s were insanely high. AZT is quite deadly, and no one that I'm aware of denies this anymore. Even if you believe the standard wisdom on HIV, megadoses of AZT are a bad, bad idea according to most sources. Giving an HIV+ person the standard doses of AZT that were used 15 years ago would be considered medical malpractice now. If you use it at all, you're supposed to use it in very small doses in combination with other drug therapies.
Well, that's true in the US and Europe anyway. In Africa, apparently not so much.
Any chance that giving those kids better food and clean water might help them more than drugs? Just curious.
Democide has many faces. The HIV=>AIDS orthodoxy is one of them.
Canada, I understand, does not do this and the childhood AIDS deaths there are totally insignificant.
I have no knowledge of the European protocols or statistics.
I do have a question, and maybe this is something for a different thread, but is there any, even anecdotal, evidence of people getting BETTER after starting any of these AIDS treatments? People who were doing badly, who started taking these chemical treatments and got better? Or got cured? I realize the very definition of "AIDS" means you can never be 'cured', but I mean for all intents and purposes, back to the same state as before the disease or malady was affecting their life. Cancer can be cured, a cold is cured, a broken leg can be cured. Can someone with AIDS ever be 'cured'? Or is it just a holding action, putting off getting sicker and sicker until you die?
BTW, Dean, your posts on this subject led me to decline an AIDS test at a physical, after seeing all the links to stories about what happened after false positives. I certainly don't want to go through any of that.
There is a fair amount of a lot more than anecdotes about the "Lazarus effect" attributed to these drugs early on. The fact is that as Dr. K. wrote in the YBYL post, they are ALL very powerful, and very general antimicrobials, and if a person is suffering a number of otherwise antibiotic resistant infections, they can appear to make him well again in a very short time. This of course is absolutely different from their purported mode of action, i.e. eliminating the virus, and stimulating an immune system recovery, all of which could never happen in the time frames these "miracle cures" occurred. If a person is otherwise well, they are simply pure posions.
There's no question that HIV leads to immune deficiency if left untreated, but those who propose that there are other factors have a point too. I'm convinced if you do everything possible to hurt the immune system while taking HIV meds, they will not be very effective. I'm also convinced if you have the HIV virus and take care of your body, you'll still end up dead, sooner or later, from opportunistic infections.
Given today's medicines and that they seem quite tolerable, I think the cost/benefit analysis works. Fifteen years ago on massive AZT, I might have a different opinion.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.