For several years now I've been hanging out in m4m aol chatrooms to reach gay men who are newly diagnosed or about to get tested. In the 5 years that I had an aol website up, I received over 100,000 hits and helped save hundreds of lives, until AOL deleted my site. I get a lot of static from it, especially in the HIV chatrooms. Here is an IM that I received recently and my reply:
AnitaShlg [1:15 AM]: why do you insist on causing trouble when meds are keeping so many of us alive? Dear Anita, HIV meds have never kept anyone alive. They are killing people slower than they used to because they are less toxic then earlier formulations and they are being given to people who aren't sick at the start. I had over 200 friends who believed as you do. They are all dead and buried or cremated now. Everyone who followed my advice did well. A couple were scared back to the doctors by well-meaning, but scared, people like you. They are dead now too. In all these years, can you tell me why there is not one properly controlled study to show that these drugs help anybody (except the people who market them?) They compare one drug to another or different combinations of drugs. Never do they have a branch of the study that includes people like me and the hundreds of thousands who have been "HIV-positive" for at least 20 years but have never sought treatment for their "condition." There is no reason to even believe that these drugs are beneficial. They are, for the most part, chemotherapy drugs that kill cells and are highly immunosuppressive. Why would want to take immunosuppressive treatments when they are already thought to be immunosuppressed? They are all based on the failed "HIV theory" of AIDS. They destroy the bone marrow, the thymus, the liver and a lot of other vital parts of the body. They in no way create health, although initially, because of their high toxicity, they kill off all sorts of parasitic and fungal infections and may temporarily alleviate some symptoms. Their effectiveness is measured by invalid surrogate markers. My information may cause trouble for people who are insecure in their beliefs, but it saves lives of intelligent people who want to be able to make truly informed decisions. To my way of thinking people who are against the free flow of information, people who want to censor what others may see, are causing all the trouble. E