My Introduction to the Dissidents

When I attempted to share my discovery with the major AIDS organizations, and eventually the White House, to my surprise, no one wanted to know about it..  AmFAR never replied to me,  GMHC wasn't interested, but sent me to ActUp.  ActUp wasn't really interested either but referred me to their Treatment Activist Group, who showed no interest either, but told me about a group called HEAL (Heal Education AIDS Liaison) who might be.

Unlike the pretty white boys (and concerned women) of ActUp whose meetings reminded me of Nazi rallies, the group at HEAL was a lot less polished and a lot more ethnicly mixed.  And unlike the ActUp rallies that filled the main hall, their meeting had a more clandestine feeling.  They were very interested in my discovery, and I was very interested in them.  What I saw were about 40 men and women of all colors and various states of health, but mostly healthy, who were sharing their experiences. 

Some believed herbal therapies were responsible for their good health.  Others credited various mushrooms or other home remedies, enemas, etc. for their ability to remain healthy with HIV.  The common thread with all of them, however, was that they had fired their doctors and rejected the medical intervention.  They were not only interested in my immune-boosting exercise, but also in something else I had just found.

After learning that I was HIV-positive and believing my discovery, which was (and still is) a common thread in all the holistic clinics throughout the world which were successfully curing cancer, I wanted to find people, other than my handful of friends, who might have also used this technique successfully with HIV/AIDS.  I put a little advertisement on the back page of the Village Voice.  I could only afford to run it for a couple of weeks and didn't get the response I was looking for. 

I got only one response to the ad and it wasn't from someone who had used this technique to cure HIV/AIDS.  It was a report by a couple of microbiologists (a professor at a local community college and his wife) who had done no original research, but merely evaluated everything that been published on the subject during the first seven years of the epidemic WITH SCIENTIFIC SCRUTINY, and came to the conclusion that this was not an infectious, fatal syndrome caused by a virus and spread through sex and needle sharing, as we were being told, but a multifactorial lifestyle disease that was fully reversible.

Then I learned that there were many people, highly intelligent and respected in their fields, which included medicine, the sciences, law, religion, the humanities, education and journalism, who questioned the viral theory of AIDS, and that these people were frequently being silenced and shunned.  These are the AIDS dissidents, and I found myself to be one them.