AIDS – Knowledge and Dogma, Conditions for the Emergence and Decline of Scientific Theories features speakers from around the world to address questions, like:

• Why has there been no AIDS epidemic in Europe or North America, despite repeated predictions over the last 25 years?
• Where is the vaccine against HIV that’s been “just around the corner” since 1985?
• What’s happened to the tens of billions of dollars invested in AIDS over the last 25 years?
• How did Africa manage to double its population in the last two decades while we were told the continent was drowning in disaster?
• How did Uganda become one of the fastest growing countries today, even though it’s been hit harder by HIV/AIDS than any other African nation? And how did it overcome the epidemic without AIDS drugs?
• Why has the discoverer of HIV, Prof. Luc Montagnier, declared that “someone with a good immune system can get rid of HIV within a few weeks”?
  www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQoNW7lOnT4

Conference presentations will be presented or translated into English and German.  Check out their website for details about conference speakers and program (German version website here).

Here’s to a successful conference!  Hopefully organizers will post videos of the presentations following the conference for those of us unable to attend in person.

(image courtesy of The Ethical Nag)

Just how much are physicians influenced by pharmaceutical reps bearing gifts? It’s a question recently posed in this report on Medscape, based on posts at a physician-only discussion group.

The original question seems simple enough: “Are you influenced by the ads on paper and pens?” It was asked by a family physician in a recent posting on Medscape’s Physician Connect (MPC).

What follows are several indignant responses from fellow physicians about how they could not be bought with coffee mugs or pens, “or any other gift worth only pennies at best.”

Others disagree, and the doctors debate the relative merit of the current system, with some of them acknowledging that they rely on Pharma for their continuing education:

Still other physicians argue that there is a benefit to having drug reps visit the office with samples and gifts. A urologist says, “Shutting your doors to the pharma world is limiting your exposure to new meds, new applications of old meds, and the changing patterns of insurance coverage.”

A general practitioner agrees, “How [else] would you make yourself aware of new drugs that have arrived on the scene? Read the ads in journals? Where would you get the details you need to know about the drug? How long would it take before you became aware of what’s new? When you have a question about a drug, if there were no samples and no package inserts to view, what resource would you use?”

The cost for this pharma-funded continuing education delivered to the front door of physicians’ practices?

Indeed, a meta-analysis published in JAMA in 2000 found that the estimated $8000-$13,000 spent per year on each physician does affect prescribing and professional behavior.^[1] A small study published in the International Journal of Health Services in 2009 suggested that patients, too, are aware of the pharmaceutical gifts that doctors receive.^[2] Furthermore, researchers found that patients’ approval of gifts was related to the perceived value of the gift to patients as well as its monetary value.

Eight to 13 thousand dollars, per physician, per year?   That’s a lot of pens and coffee mugs.

Articles like these reinforce for me that what is being called “health care” in the United States is nothing more than “medicine peddling”. Medical training for doctors is all about… well, medicine, which is not the same thing as health. So why are doctors referred to as “health care providers” when their training and practice is so limited and narrow?

If you need a drug, visit your doctor. If you need help improving your health, find a healer. Hint: they are not listed in your “health” insurance provider directory.

Since then I’ve been tracking these websites of interest to AIDS dissidents and updating an Excel spreadsheet every few months.  Not that I don’t have too much time on my hands, but it isn’t that difficult or time-consuming to do if you find that sort of thing entertaining.

Here is how Alexa describes what their rank means:

The rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors to resistanceisfruitful.com and pageviews on resistanceisfruitful.com over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1.

In other words, Google’s Alexa rank is 1; Facebook’s is 2 and so on.  Another way to think about this is that there are 6,000 websites with more traffic than the site with an Alexa rank of 6,001.

So, The New York Times’ Alexa rank is 91.  The Weather Channel is 113.  The website rank for the city of Kansas City is 279,211, while that of my home town of  Colby, Kansas is 9,156,448.

Get it?

All of these are global rankings, which means they are based on total Internet traffic data collected from a variety of sources.  Alexa also breaks down the data for some sites according to country.

Below is a list of Dissident and Dogmatist sites, sorted according to the latest global rankings from Alexa (Dogmatist sites highlighted in yellow).  I am more than just puzzled that resistance is fruitful is currently the second highest ranked AIDS dissident website, and I’ll discuss why below.

It doesn’t take much Googling to find a lot of criticism about the validity of Alexa’s ranking, as well as some black hatters wanting to sell their supposed “secrets” for gaming Alexa’s system.  Alexa, which is owned by amazon.com, defends its methods, which they update periodically to stay ahead of the bad guys.

For the record, I have never contemplated, let alone implemented any illicit code or unethical strategies to artificially inflate my blog’s rank.  I have installed the Alexa toolbar in my Firefox browser; I include a link in my signature when I comment on the web; and I promote this blog to about 150 facebook “friends”, and as a bloglet on OpenSalon, where I started posting a year and a half ago.  The last thing on my mind then was being popular.  I was coming out of a pharma-induced haze and struggling through the consequences of dealing with more than a decade of severe medical and health problems.  I just wanted to tell my story.  Blogging was therapy.  If I’d only known then what I know now!

So, what is one to think of these rankings?

First of all, take them with a grain of salt.  Lists of rankings, like the one above, can be flawed and have some weaknesses.  I don’t trust Alexa’s algorithms to know with certainty that Site A is really more popular than Site B, for example.

Systems like Alexa are more valuable for comparing a site with itself over time.  If Alexa says Site A’s traffic increased 15% last month, while Site B’s traffic declined by 55%, I think that is valid and useful information.

That is the kind of data analysis I do in an Excel spreadsheet.  With it I can sort data gathered over a period of time and see almost immediately, for example, that Heal London is growing quickly in popularity, moving up the list 28 places since last December, when House of Numbers was in the #1 position (currently #4).  The former AIDS Myth Exposed also used to rank near the top of the list until the forums there were moved to a new site called  Questioning AIDS (which I am also involved with).  QA quickly moved to the top of list of Dissident websites while AME fell like a rock off a cliff, and Treatment Information Group saw a significant bump in traffic from a domain redirect for AME.

Isn’t that all fascinating?

There is other data, some of it available at Alexa, that bloggers and webmasters should consider more important than number of clicks, or “hits”.  How many pages does a visitor read, for example.  How long does a reader spend on my site?  What percentage of hits are new visitors, versus returning guests?  I’d rather have 12 visitors a day who read several pages and spend 15 minutes here, than have 100 “hits” that take a quick glance and “bounce” off to another blog or website.

On the other hand, a site with an Alexa rank larger than a few thousand (remember, higher numbers = lower rank) is not likely to change the world, either.  And a blog toddling along at say… 6 million or so, is probably being read by friends and family.  That’s OK.  I doubt that more than a few casual bloggers do so to become famous or important, though some may try.  Most of us just want to get something off of our chests, or want to tell our personal story, or maybe share family news and photos.

The larger question I’ve been pondering is: what does it say about a community—a so-called “movement”—to be represented by a list of bloggers and websites with rankings like those above?

There are obviously a lot of people affected by AIDS in ways that can only be labeled as “questioning”, or “rethinking”, or what I am calling “dissident”.  After all, they are the bulk of the more than 70 such sites on my links page!  Still, most of these blogs barely show up on Alexa’s radar.  And the so-called “Dogmatists”, or as I prefer to call them, “anti-Dissidents”—those hardy, vocal souls who consider us a threat so grave that we should be silenced—rank pretty far down that list.

My ego would love to toot my horn and exclaim that I am significant, or at least a big fish in a small pond, but the realist in me knows better.  Others write better, are more knowledgeable and have more to say than I do.

This list tells me that AIDS dissidence, despite being around since the beginning of what has come to be called AIDS, has a very small following, but that doesn’t have to mean we are inconsequential.

Consider that arguably the largest mainstream AIDS website, The Body, with all the resources and financial backing of government grants and BigPharma advertising, manages to rank only 32,398, while similarly backed poz.com and aidsmeds.com are ranked 62,765 and 236,628 respectively.  Assuming the Alexa rankings reflect relevance in the Internet community, “AIDS” doesn’t rank that high in general, so why should I expect AIDS dissidence to be of great interest to very many people?

We are not a large community, and it is unlikely we ever will be, at least for the foreseeable future.  Basing our relevance and importance on numbers like Alexa rankings might be compared to trying to track one’s health using numbers from CD4 and so-called viral load test results—interesting, but of limited value.  There are better ways to gauge our health and there are surely better ways to judge our significance.

I choose to be content with the handful of new contacts I have made, as well as re-establishing a couple of old relationships  with others who are also simply not convinced that the AIDS mainstream has things figured out the way they’d like us to believe.

I learned a long time ago that I cannot save the world from injustice and unfairness, but that doesn’t mean there is no value in speaking out against both.  I did not get involved with AIDS Dissidence because I believe in Superman.  I do not think anyone can stop the runaway train called AIDS with their bare hands.  Nothing short of a wreck will stop it.

I recently unboxed some of the early media accounts of my life as an openly gay AIDS activist in Kansas City.  The very first words in the very first article ever written about me as an activist proclaim:  “Jon D. Barnett is an angry young man.”

That anger served me well as fuel for many years of social activism, though it ultimately took a toll in burnout and poor health.

Nearly ten years later, when I was diagnosed as HIV-positive, my world tail-spinned and I withdrew socially for nearly a decade.  The anger that once drove me was now directed internally against an invisible—and supposedly invincible—enemy.

It was only after the life-changing experience of quitting all pharmaceutical drugs in 2007 that I began to work my way out of my drug induced, self-imposed exile.

While questioning the wisdom of committing to a lifetime of AIDS drugs may be controversial, it is not crazy and there is definitely no malicious intent in telling my story.  I simply cannot have the life experiences I have had and keep them to myself.

One would think from some of the reactions I’ve gotten from readers, viewers and even personal friends lately that I am trying to hurt people, though nothing could be further from the truth.

A couple of weeks ago, as I sat across the table from a friend I’ve known for decades, I felt his hurt and his anger as he challenged me for suggesting that it may not be necessary for everyone to take ARVs for life to survive a positive HIV diagnosis. There is more to his story. His partner had just been brought back from the brink of death a few months ago after starting HAART.  He was a real-life example of the “Lazarus” effect.

Never mind that it takes HIV ten years or more to cause symptoms, ARVs are credited with restoring health in just a few months! I did not have adequate answers for all of my friends’ questions, nor did I feel that was my job.  What was important was that we discovered that we shared many of the same questions, though getting there took quite a bit of effort to overcome the misdirected anger and hurt first.

On my youtube page I have posted a video about the LOTTI study, which found that many positive people can successfully quit their drugs for long periods of time, and possibly even permanently. (I also blogged about the LOTTI study here). The video has received comments from some people involved in “AIDS education”, including a poz man from Portland, Oregon.

In a comment he has since deleted, youtuber gbfowler was apparently frightened enough by the notion of some people choosing to try a drug-free alternative path to recover their health that he felt compelled to counter the message of hope I had presented, warning others who might stumble upon the video that my views are “extreme” and that “99 percent of HIV docs and researchers disagree with [me].”  Of course, he is right on both accounts, but the question begs:  why did he feel it was so important to warn others of the obvious?

Yes, it made me angry that someone who makes their living pushing drugs onto other gay men would express only fear about any scientific information that offers hope to tens of thousands of gay men—many of them otherwise healthy—who are facing, or have already embraced a lifetime of chemotherapy.

Talk about extreme and dangerous ideas!

The gay community has developed a myopic view of AIDS in the last few decades, thanks in no small part to massive, well-funded marketing and “education” campaigns designed to convince us that we must give up natural sexual intimacy and instead embark on a lifetime of chemotherapy.  Self-funded, actually, as the  largest non-governmental supporters of most AIDS organizations in the U.S.—pharmaceutical companies—invest in these (marketing) agencies with their profits from AIDS patients, the vast majority of whom are gay men.

Why in the world would I want to challenge this image of the modern pill-popping, disease ridden, latex wrapped gay man?! (sarcasm, for those who need to be told).

Talking to a television reporting at an ACT UP/KC demonstration outside the FDA, demanding faster access to AIDS drugs, circa 1989.

Despite what some gay men seem to think, I am not the enemy and if my story or my writing makes some of you feel that I am, it may be a good indication that our communal psyche has been fucked with.  I have a long history of fighting for my community. I will continue to fight for gay men until they put my ashes in the ground, which I hope will be a few more decades yet.

There was a time when I organized die-ins to demand faster access to unproven drugs.  I picketed the Circle K convenience store that denied health insurance to a PWA—by myself—before founding ACT UP in Kansas City. I ran the first campaign as an openly gay candidate for city council.  I co-founded the organization that worked to pass a gay rights law in Kansas City, served as regional editor of one of the largest lesbian and gay news publications in the Midwest, and have received recognition for leadership in my community.

I realize that all of this must sound boastful, and yes, I am proud of my life and my accomplishments.  My point though is that I have a lifetime record of promoting and advancing the gay community, not hurting it.

Covering an ACT UP demonstration for the News-Telegraph, a regional gay newspaper,  in the early 1990s.

I have paid my dues and I have earned my props.  I am not only entitled to share what I’ve discovered since my own HIV-diagnosis in 1998, I am obligated to do so.  I have faced down threats to my safety, to my livelihood and to my health.

I am appalled and distressed by the lemming-like behavior of my own community and wonder why and when did we stop challenging the establishment?  I do not stand in judgment of others, because it is obvious I have been a lemming in the past too.

I will spend the next stage of my life trying to advance a new message to the gay community.  We cannot accept the current terms of the Final Solution, as spelled out by one of the largest segments of the U.S. economy—the pharmaceutical industry and its allies in government and social agencies.

Are we really for sale so cheaply?

I am constantly rethinking my views and my beliefs, and I assume others do so as well. When I was a  teenager, I had a religious experience in the Jesus movement commonly referred to as “born again.” When I came out of the closet as a gay man a few years later, I was born again. Again. Since then I have been reborn more times—mentally, spiritually and emotionally—than I can count, and I hope I continue to be open-minded to new ideas and ways of thinking and believing.

I did not come to this place called AIDS dissidence easily or smoothly.  It is not a particularly fun or easy place to be.  It is not even really a place at all.  It is more like an anti-place… a not-place to be.  It is all of the space that exists outside of the AIDS meme.  (Note:  the link may be irreverent, but it does a good job of capturing just a few of the reasons I refer to a “meme” here.)

Lately I find myself struggling to find ways to break through the (fear of) death culture that has snared the gay community the last few decades. Not since I was a teenager have I felt so alone and lonely in how I think and how I feel. Unlike those years, thanks to the Internet I have managed to make contact with a handful of gay men who walk a similar path.

The anger in my life has never completely subsided, it has just morphed into a different form of energy as I’ve learned to co-exist with it in ways that do not consume me.  I hope I have learned to conserve my energy and to focus it more intensely where it is needed, as I no longer wish to be a flamethrower, preferring to strive instead to be a torch.

That some people find my words and my work to be dangerous and threatening is reason enough for me to keep thinking and writing and speaking out. I am not trying to burn down the house; I am trying to cut the lock off the prison door.

Startling similarities when comparing micrographs of budding HIV and budding HERVs.

Could it be that we are getting closer to a (more) unified alternative explanation for what causes “AIDS”?  There are several recently published articles, as well as conversations between the authors, that just may prove to be the impetus for such a epiphany.

This is not about some startling new discovery.  It is the work of lay people wading through the scientific literature and gleaning and assembling already documented knowledge and information in ways that most orthodox scientists simply seem incapable of doing.

Most recently, Liam Scheff has published another great piece of writing, How AIDS Didn’t Become a Kissing Disease, which further challenges the mainstream explanation for AIDS.

In the article, Scheff presents official government definitions for what retroviruses are as he wanders through the history of “HIV”.  He notes  Matthew Gonda’s discovery of “HIV” in the saliva of healthy and ill gay men in the 1980s, though no self-respecting AIDS risk reduction educator today would suggest that HIV can be transmitted by kissing or even oral sex.  Gonda incidentally co-authored scientific articles with the now discredited discoverer of HTLVIII/LAV/HIV, Robert Gallo.

The article concludes that what Gallo and others were seeing are actually Human endogenous retroviruses, or HERVs; self-made cellular messengers that our bodies create in reaction to stressors and toxins, the same way scientists create them in the lab.  Scheff suggests that nutritional responses can suppress the expression of HERVs.

Other writers have written about issues of gut dysfunction and exposure to toxins that are entirely compatible with the theory that HIV is a HERV.  What remains to be done, in my personal opinion, is to tie these various perspectives together and to present a unified alternative theory of AIDS that can be understood by a fifth grader.

Until that happens, those readers who are struggling to understand the significance of a positive test result owe it to themselves to read the collection of writings by Schell and Cal Crilly at reducetheburden.org, as well as the essential and related information contained in Tony Lance’s paper, Gay Related Intestinal Dysbiosis.  It really isn’t that difficult to make the connections for oneself, but it does take some time and effort and for most people, it also requires some de-programming to allow the mind to accept new information.

As an Affected gay man, I struggle mightily to explain what I’ve learned to friends and others who find themselves in a similar situation.  That job is nigh-impossible as long as people remain uninformed and in the dark.  When I worked for the New-Telegraph in the 1980s and 1990s, the masthead read:  “Knowledge is Power”.  Nothing could be truer today.

Some folks seem to be so deeply mired in the world of AIDS that they are unable to rise above their peer-reviewed journals and view the world as a big picture.  This tunnel vision allows them to overlook, if not protest, all of the contradictions that are ever more likely to show up in the online media.

Reports like this one from the Journal of Medical Case Reports, via Medscape.  A 28-year-old Polish woman presented at a hospital with respiratory problems, rash and ulcerations, among other things.  Doctors were ready to presumptively diagnose “Human immunodeficiency virus seroconversion syndrome complicated by Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia” until a PCR test result came back negative.

The actual disease?  Measles!  I didn’t write the headline:  Measles Mimicking HIV Seroconversion Syndrome: A Case Report, a peer reviewed journal editor determined that from reading the research.

In this case, the misdiagnosis was caught in a modern European hospital, but what would the outcome have been in a less developed part of the world, or even in a rural or community medical clinic with less capability?

Then there is this Reuters report about a supposedly deadly link between salmonella and HIV in Africa.  That’s right, the bacteria typically responsible for food poisoning and the lethal HI virus.  According to this report, researchers are puzzled to discover that HIV-positive people with salmonella did not have a suppressed immune system, but rather an excess of antibodies to salmonella.

“It’s quite a surprise and it suggests that what we are dealing with here is more of a consequence of an immune disregulation as opposed to an immune deficiency per se,” said lead researcher Cal MacLennan of the University of Birmingham.

MacLennan’s  comment is spot-on consistent with the views of Dr. Heinrich Kremer, author of The Silent Revolution in Cancer and AIDS Medicine.  Kremer is a qualified and outspoken opponent of the use of anti-retroviral drugs and a critic of the HIV theory of causation of AIDS.

I approach scientific research as a layperson.  My interest is in taking the pulse of the current state of science, as presented in the media, including, but not limited to peer-reviewed journals.  My area of interest is obviously AIDS, which I have been intimately involved with since it was called GRID.

It doesn’t take a lot of research to find these reports.  Contradiction after contradiction parade across my screen these days, courtesy of Google Reader.  Inconsistent information about AIDS was also the norm in the 1980s and 90s, when the current mainstream theory was being manufactured by the virologists.

I simple share some of the more obvious contradictions here occasionally, as well as at QuestioningAIDS and then leave it to others to draw whatever conclusions they can from this litany of inconsistencies, particularly as it pertains to AIDS.

What is almost amusing is how some of the more rabid AIDS apologists protest my posts about these questions.  It’s kind of flattering to imagine they feel threatened, but I just don’t understand why anyone would think science is immune to contradictions. Historically, contradiction has been one of the essential engines for scientific advances.

Seth Kalichman, someone named Lisa and J Todd Deshong huddle at “The Harvard Symposium”, an anti-AIDS dissident forum hastily organized last October in an attempt to counter the RethinkingAIDS 2009 Conference.
(photo from dissidents4dumbees.blogspot.com)

Is it ethical to withhold comments from rude and obnoxious haters?

Yes, I’m talking about my most active critic, Baylor Health Care System’s online AIDS diagnostician, and recently revealed Internet sleuth, J Todd Deshong.

In the comment thread for an article at a another website, Todd recently accused me of—among other things—not posting comments he has made to my blog.  I replied that I have not seen any comments from him for months.

It turns out that we are both right, and I need to provide some background to explain.

A couple of months ago, Todd posted content from my blog on his anti-AIDS dissident blog, dissidents4dumbees.  Problem is, he failed to properly attribute the source of that content by providing a link to it, despite my request that he do so.  In fact, he has never posted a link to resistanceisfruitful, though he has mentioned me fairly frequently lately.

It should be obvious to anyone who has followed my blog that there is no love lost between Todd and me.  Todd has posted numerous nasty unflattering and dishonest comments and posts about me and other AIDS dissidents on his blog.  It would be fair to say I am one of a handful of AIDS dissidents that he is fixated on, and I am guilty of having taken him to task here a couple of times too.

As if having his own blog is not enough, Todd has also abused the comments feature of my blog by trying to make off-topic and inflammatory remarks—a trademark of his blog.  Unlike Todd, I have had some journalism and editorial experience and I understand why it is acceptable to have standards for publication.

His failure to be a good netizen by properly attributing source material on his blog (another source on that subject here), particularly when requested to do so, irked me so much that I marked one of Todd’s off-topic comments here as spam, rather than just deleting it.  My automated spam service then took the initiative to send all subsequent comments from him to the spam folder, which I rarely look at.

From my perspective there is a certain poetic justice in this.  There are consequences to our conduct, and Todd has found that out.  I did not realize what happened until Todd brought the matter to my attention today, and in hindsight I should have known better than to think Todd just “went away”.  That is definitely not his style.

Unlike Todd, I have always provided links to his blog when writing about him.  It’s the right thing to do and there’s no reason to deny my readers that information.  They are smart enough to decide what to think for themselves.

Personally, I think he does the cause of AIDS dissidence more good than harm.  He is so bombastic that it almost hurts to read his posts.  The catty, dishy queen in him may or may not be a learned stereotype, but it does remind me of some other bitter gay men I have known.

I also get a bit of a kick out of seeing his website ranking (more on that below) jump whenever I blog about him, though it doesn’t always last.

I have been thinking about whether or not to approve Todd’s “comments” but my own bitchy side feels more like tit for tat right now.  Hey, I’m only human too.  Showing some good faith would go a long way with me, but I’m not holding my breath, especially since Todd just posted yet another fabricated tale about me working for the IRS and threatening him with an audit!

Search engines love links and sites that use them.  Search engines and the people who use them seek out sites with content, integrity and credibility… words that Todd also likes to throw around, but doesn’t really understand very well.  Failing to link sources speaks volumes about his own insecurity, and how little he trusts his readers to read the source material he is pontificating about for themselves.

Posting links is not only the right thing to do, it might just be good for his blog.

For example, global Internet reach the past 3 months for our two blogs, per the web information company Alexa as of today (in this case, smaller numbers are better):

dissidents4dumbees – 4,312,123 (more than 4 million websites get more hits than d4d)

resistanceisfruitful -      421,018 (less than 1/2 million websites get more hits than rif)

I’m a geek and I track stuff like this, so I just happen to know that I am one of the best things to happen to Todd, whether he knows it or not.  His rank improves every time I write about him.  You would think he would be more grateful for all I’ve done to promote his provocative, if not intellectually dishonest blog.

Speaking of numbers, during the same three month period, my readers viewed nearly 8 pages per visit, compared to Todd’s 2.2.  Visitors to resistanceisfruitful spent an average of 17.9 minutes on my site, compared to 4.9 minutes at Todd’s.

Just sayin’.

UPDATE May 14, 2010

After a good night’s sleep, I’ve decided to post most of Todd’s comments, though I reserve the right to moderate my own personal space in the future.  I don’t mind criticism, but if Todd cannot make his point in two or three comments, it’s time for him to utilize his own blog, which I have provided generous and abundant links to.

I did have to delete two of Todd’s comments because they were completely off-topic and/or libelous.  I have a responsibility as a publisher to exercise some judgment.

UPDATE II May 31, 2010

While I was out of town visiting my mum this past week, Todd spammed my blog with seven new comments in three days, and he has written a new defamatory post dedicated to me on his own blog.

True to form, most of his comments were off-topic, or personal attacks and name-calling, along with a good measure of flat-out untruthfulness.  For example, Todd asserts that I work for the IRS and am stalking him from government computers there.  This outrageous and unfounded statement reeks of clinical paranoia (not that I’m qualified to make that diagnosis, but according to wikipedia….).

Since Todd has his own blog space which I have generously linked to above, there is no good reason to post his bile and venom here on my blog.

However, in an effort to be as fair as possible, I am posting many of those comments, despite the fact that they violate my personal sense of propriety and good taste.  The name-calling is particularly unnecessary and onerous.

Some blogs thrive on lengthy back-and-forth arguments in the comments sections.  This is not one of them.  Most people lose interest pretty quickly and the debate ultimately devolves to personalities, rather than substance.  I do expect that I will ultimately ban J Todd Deshong, but I will publish enough of his comments to help the average reader understand why I eventually lose patience with him.

Recently, published reports from various scientific fields offer new insight about possible ways the human immune system wards off disease, specifically those conditions blamed on viruses, such as AIDS and hepatitis.

For starters, the latest word from atrociously well-funded AIDS researchers is that they’ve discovered the secret to defeating the HI virus by studying elite controllers (ECs), those people who test positive for HIV antibodies but never get sick, at least not according to any of the major AIDS theories.

As virologists, these scientists at MIT ultimately base their research and subsequent findings on assumptions established using the original faulty research of the now-discredited “co-discoverer” of HIV, Robert Gallo.  According to them, ECs have a genetic trait that causes them to create “super t-cells” that can defeat HIV and other viruses, such as Hep C.

Glia cell in cell culture from neonatal mouse brain, green: glia cell, red: peroxisome. (Courtesy of Max-Planck-Institute for experimental medicine, Goettingen, Germany)

Meanwhile, across town at Children’s Hospital Boston, less well known molecular and cellular biologists are busy performing research that continues to throw cold water on  Virology’s notion that t-cells are the key to fighting viral infections in the first place.  According to them, organelles inside the cell known as peroxisomes can detect virus invasion signals and launch a limited antiviral offensive. Other organelles, the mitochondria, follow up with a more definitive antiviral counterattack.

Even the headlines for these very different explanations for stopping viral infections tell a story.  Virologists are “finding secrets” to “mysterious viruses” while the cellular biologists report “mild-mannered helpers” of the immune system.  While mild mannered may not sound nearly so dazzling as secretive and mysterious, this research being conducted at a community hospital sounds exciting.

What is a poor layperson like myself to think of these very different explanations for how our immune systems work?  I may be out of my league to try to analyze these kinds of research reports too finely, but it shouldn’t take a rocket scientist (or a virologist or a molecular biologist) to realize that “Science” has not conclusively defined the process by which these supposedly lethal viruses kill.

Add this new information to the huge questions of what viruses actually are, where they come from and what they do, as articulated by Janine Roberts in her book Fear of the Invisible, for example, and the basis for skepticism grows exponentially.  Roberts reports on the body of research conducted by cellular biologists purporting that at least some viruses—retroviruses, in particular—may actually be cellular messengers that are manufactured by our body’s cell.  These are called endogenous viruses and every human being is chock full of them for good reasons.

Reading these various accounts of what is going on in the world of Science recently has led me to think that we just might soon be reading about a significant and newsworthy breakthrough very soon.  I hope that isn’t just my personal optimism working overtime.

I also read the tea leaves of published accounts by the AIDS industry and it appears that they, too, see the writing on the wall of the demise of the ‘HIV=AIDS, unless you take the expensive and toxic drugs for the rest of your life’ meme.

The line between the terms “HIV” and “AIDS” have been blurred since the beginning of the epidemic, resulting in lengthy and convoluted treatises that attempt to explain how AIDS is not a disease, but rather a syndrome of diseases, yet the treatment of choice is one-size-fits-all.  More recently, AIDS is becoming even more blurred as public health policy makers (and grant seekers) now lump it in with malaria, tuberculosis and other viral diseases like hepatitis.  This appears to me to be a rather transparent attempt to keep funding within the AIDS establishment, rather than refocusing the commitment to fight long standing epidemics of actual diseases that can be cured and prevented without drugs.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that the work of cellular biologists will soon result in a new way of viewing illness from diseases like these in the very near future.  This new view will hopefully be heeded and will result in a shift of our scarce public funding resources from “fighting sneaky viruses” to working to eliminate the common contributing factors of malnutrition, poverty, lack of sanitation and clean water and drug abuse.

Then again, maybe what I’m feeling is simply optimism, rather than intuition.

11+ years of viral load testing

I continue to monitor my CD4 and viral load for a number of reasons that make sense to me, and as a result I can graph the last 11+ years of these numbers.

I have updated these graphs and posted them here so others can see how wildly variable these numbers can be.

According to the mainstream HIV/AIDS theory, if viral activity is UP, the number of CD4 immune system cells should go down. That is certainly not the case with my numbers.

More significantly, these laboratory markers do not track with my actual health. For example, my CD4 count increased both times I was hospitalized for DVT blood clots.  Conversely, some of my worst medical conditions, such as severe neuropathy and measurable brain inflammation, occurred while my viral load was at or near “undetectable” levels and CD4 counts were double what they’ve been the past several years.

When my most recent counts came back a few days ago, my viral load had more than tripled from the last count six months ago, and was nearly 10 times its level 9 months ago.  It is more than double the next highest count during the last 11 years, including at least a couple of “blips” (unexplained spikes in viral load that are either insignificant, or warnings of impending disaster, depending on who one listens to).

CD4 counts fluctuate wildly

At the same time, my CD4 count and CD4 % had both increased, an event which completely contradicts the mainstream explanation of “how AIDS works”.

Because my doctor (a board-certified “HIV-Specialist”) runs his own labs in-house, I wondered if this aberration could be a lab error, so I requested that he order new tests from an outside lab, such as LabCorp or Quest Diagnosics.  I also wondered if the recent Bell’s palsy might be affecting the test results.

Here is my doctor’s response:

Presently, the major indicators for starting HIV therapy is the CD4# not the viral load. We use to consider that to some degree but the CD4 count is the overriding factor for the disease.

I do not think it is necessary to redraw the test since the CD4 count is the major determinant and as that is OK, you are fine. I would not recommend any change in our treatment plan at present.

-Doc

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. We are apparently back to 1985 in terms of how we monitor immune system performance and possible disease progression.

I cannot challenge him further without leaving his practice (a distinct possibility), but one has to ask:  what is the goal of HAART (Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy), if not to reduce viral load to “undetectable”?

Why are thousands of people, especially gay men here in the U.S.  and Europe, being terrorized into taking ARV drugs based on these test results?

Doc can say what he wants, but the conventional wisdom being pounded in the heads of gay men via the media, community-based AIDS organizations, and mass marketing campaigns, is that the overriding objective for anyone testing “poz” is an undetectable viral load.

My doctor is an enigma, but in some ways I’m lucky. How many other doctors would be screaming at me to (re)start the drugs based solely on this test result?  I personally know of two of them, because I walked away from them when they tried doing exactly that.

I am disappointed though that he isn’t as interested as I am in ruling out the possibility of a faulty test, or other explanation for this latest “blip” in my viral load results.  I wasn’t asking to retest in order to consider taking HAART again.  It will take a lot more than a single test result to drive me back to that hell.  I simply wanted to verify the test result for my records.

I actually agree with and applaud Doc’s opinion that I not make “any change in our treatment plan at present”, because “our” treatment plan is to to nothing other than try to live as healthfully as possible… without pharmaceutical drugs.

Personally, I think Doc is tired of seeing his patients die of simultaneous, multiple organ failure.  I’d like to think that as much as we butt heads sometimes, some part of him is grateful to have even a few patients remain free of the common ailments affecting people on HAART.

It is his inability to see the flaws in his rationale that drives me nuts. I just want to shake him by the shoulders in the hopes he might wake up from his trance and join the rest of us in speaking out and speaking up about the anomalies (I am being kind by using that word) of the HIV/AIDS theory, as it is currently being practiced in the West.

It is the same tunnel-vision that that researchers in SF and other cities are using to try to justify mass drugging of “pozzies”, regardless of their overall health.  This makes no sense if viral load is not a critical measure of the level of “HIV activity”.

I do have to say that my appreciation for and support of those Affected dissidents who choose not to monitor these counts only grows each time I get my results.  They make a very good argument that getting distracted with markers that are not very meaningful can actually cause poor health.  I believe it.  Despite everything I’ve learned and know by now, I have to admit that when I first saw that spike on my chart, I felt as if I had been kicked in the gut.

It was just such a spike the caused me to restart HAART the second time in 2002 for eight months before quitting them for good.

The psychological toll of tracking a disease that is supposedly lethal is enough to make one ill.  It takes incredible  effort and energy to challenge the contradictions and inconsistencies of an entire industry created around this constructed and manmade disease that isn’t really a disease at all.  Unfortunately, the alternative is to passively accept ridiculous answers that include a lifetime of chemotherapy with combinations of toxic drugs.

Thanks, but no thanks.

I have made the mistake of making treatment decisions based on these lab results in past, and do not intend to repeat that mistake.  Still, I’m afraid that I have been tracking these numbers too long to stop now.  Like most options in life, there is rarely one “right” answer as to what is the best path to travel.  I have chosen this one and will continue to follow it, at least for now.

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:

uh oh... a computer virus from aidsmed.com?!

For the record:  I do believe it is a good idea to practice safer-surfing practices and to always use protection online.