Managing Antiretroviral (ARV) Side Effects

Danny West is a trainer, coach, and leadership consultant, has been living with HIV for the past 24 years, and remains healthy today, having been successfully treated with antiretroviral medications (ARVs) for the last five years. There are many treatments available today for HIV. Anyone who is on "combination therapy" is on a combination of multiple drugs. Early on, Danny was treated with AZT alone. In his case, the side effects of AZT monotherapy bothered him and he decided to go off AZT at that time. Since then, more antiretroviral medications have been developed, and he is now on a combination therapy that works well for him and has minimal side effects that he can manage and live with. The side effects no longer interfere with his everyday life. His viral load is undetectable, and his CD4 count is increasing. His immune system is functioning effectively and is keeping HIV at bay. For more information, visit http://www.ryl-training-consultancy.co.uk/ and http://www.AIDSvideos.org/. This video is freely downloadable from http://www.archive.org/details/ManagingAntiretroviralarvSideEffects . [Do you want to help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS? Are you fluent in a language other than English? Then volunteer to translate this video into another language! Click http://AIDSvideos.org/translate.shtml to learn how you can help!!! © Copyright 2008-2011 Global Lifeworks. All rights reserved. This work is licensed to be used for non-commercial purposes under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.]

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Howto & Style

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• arvs
• antiretroviral
• drugs
• side
• effects
• combination
• therapy
• triple
• cocktail
• hiv
• positive
• aids
• disease
• management
• danny

[historiadorderock]

@AIDSvideos Ever heard about blood electrification? So what's the conbination of retroviral meds that he takes?

[AIDSvideos]

@historiadorderock: "Blood electrification" is sheer quackery. There's no scientific evidence that such a procedure treats HIV nor is there any reason to believe it WOULD or COULD work. For more quackery, consider the folks who claim that exposing blood to ozone cures HIV, and so on ...

[DannyDee08]

how come your not cured then if your cd4 cells are increasing and your hiv cells are undetectable oh n thanks fr the confidence i will now help people realise hiv is something to wrry about and i wish you luck with your battle

[AIDSvideos]

This is Eric. A person in Danny's situation is not "cured" because HIV has not been eliminated from his body. If he stopped taking the ARVs, the virus would replicate out of control and his CD4 count would drop.

[pawncleanup1]

HIV undergoes a latent state, meaning it transforms into the chromosones, where it sleeps, then one day it will return and CD4 levels will drop. however. even though in a latent state still, the cd4 cells will continue to decrease.

[AIDSvideos]

This is Eric; I'm not a doctor. Doctors used to refer to call the period when an HIV+ person's CD4 cell count remained stable the "latent period" because they thought the virus was relatively inactive during that period. But it turns out that HIV is actually actively reproducing and infecting CD4 cells during this period; the body is just producing new CD4 cells fast enough to keep up. Over time, HIV usually starts to get ahead, and the CD4 count starts to drop.

[pawncleanup1]

sorry, you are right, i didnt word it that well

[xvsoothsayer]

*sigh* oh that's hopeful!!