The major claims seem to boil down to a few, paraphrased endlessly.
HIV meds are toxic. This is true. The dissidents claim that this does not get acknowledged by the mainstream medical establishment. This is not true to the best of my ability to discern. Everyone I’ve talked to on meds has shared their experience with the side effects. They say that this is something they are told about before they start a regimen. Standard medical practice for a variety of diseases. We don’t tell people about the side effects of drugs they won’t be taking, because that’s time consuming, and useless. HIV meds are hardly unique in having nasty side effects. Perhaps these side effects should be trumpeted loudly, particularly to the bugchasers, but that’s another story.
The denialists talk about alternate treatments, but give no information on long term survival rates for people provided only such treatments, on expense of these treatments, etc. Nor do they talk about late stage AIDS reversal rates for these treatments. Contrast this to HIV where the experiments to determine the efficacy of AZT were cut short because AZT was showing dramatic benefits and it was judged unethical to allow patients to die when treatment was available. This was probably under active pressure from ActUp and similar organizations. I do kinda wonder what the FDA on this was.
Dissidents, or denialists rarely mention the frequency with which AZT and later, cocktails produced dramatic turn-arounds in AIDS-related declines. They acknowledge that it “helps in some cases”, but never get into anything like hard numbers.
I have my own concerns about entrenched pharmaceutical interests, and I believe in the HIV theory. Assume for a second, if you don’t already, that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Pharma makes big money off of treatments for HIV. If a vaccine and a cure were both developed, such that HIV was a thing of the past and AIDS never occurred, and the profit to be made from selling this innovation were trivial, how possible would it be for makers of current HIV meds to buy off, deny or supress the creation of such? That would be difficult to arrange though. But it’s the pharmaceutical industries that run the trials for new drugs. How often will they pony up for trials of anything promising such benefits?
But, in the first several years of AIDS, the disease was treated in a variety of ways without using Protease Inhibitors or Reverse transcriptase inhibitors (AZT is one or the other I think). Do you have any real evidence that they were anywhere near as effective?
You want research done on nutritive therapy, great. Should be comparatively cheap. If there’s such good reason to doubt, why is there difficulty raising the money? Start up a parallel group to do what you believe is real research. Fundraise, prove the world wrong. I certainly won’t stand in your way. I might even donate a dollar or two.
Sorry, this is not the cohesive, point by point post I’d hoped to make, but I’m not inundated with free time. Maybe I’ll revisit the topic later.
I’ll post again..
Yeah.. I’ve run across these kinds of groups before… and their arguments are not convincing..
They, for example, claim that all of the symptoms of AIDS are caused by the toxic effects of the drugs used to treat them.. but when you point out that the exact same symptoms occur to the vast majority of Africans who aren’t receiving the drugs.. then they can’t really answer..
They seem to claim that there’s no proof that HIV causes AIDS–just correlations and then argue that HIV is a harmless virus that is most likely in millions of other people also without it causing AIDS–but we only find it in AIDS patients because we are testing for it…
Yet.. they don’t look at the fact that all those people who donate blood or plasma regularly get tested for HIV–and they don’t have it.. and don’t have AIDS… and that besides for the one small group of people with that mutant gene that makes them relatively immune to AIDS–HIV correlates extremely high with AIDS….
Basically.. I would argue that if these people are so convinced.. they should all go get some HIV infected Blood and inject themselves repeatedly until it is clear that they are HIV+.. and then they can start talking.. if they aren’t willing to put their money where their mouth is.. then they shouldn’t go around making such stark claims that can be used to inhibit aids treatment for many people..
Re: I’ll post again..
You are misrepresenting the case AIDS skepics make.
Most AIDS skeptics claim that AIDS is multi-factorial, and that so-called African AIDS is nothing but a new name for symptoms of malnutrition, chronic parasitic infections and TB.
You can find details in the following report (published in a mainstream outlet):
http://www.afrol.com/features/11116
You are also misrepresenting the AIDS skeptics’ position concerning the nature of HIV. Yes, some AIDS skeptics like Duesberg argue that HIV exists and is harmless. But many others like the scientists of the Perth Group have built a compelling case that the existence of HIV hasn’t even been proven, and that the various laboratory phenomena that are called HIV (antibodies, proteins, genetic sequences) are produced by the body itself as a symptom of immmune suppression.
Consider that the “HIV particles” that we see in EM pictures do not come from the blood of HIV+ people. Not one such particle has ever been isolated from the fresh, uncultured plasma of an HIV positive person- that’s why scientists searched in vain for 3 years for an infectious agent in the blood of AIDS sufferers in the early 1980s.
[A March 28, 1983 TIME article states,
“The new regulations, and much of the scare in general, are built on the notion that AIDS is caused by a transmissible agent. In fact, despite three years of research, there is no direct evidence that such a bug exists. CDC researchers have searched for a new virus with electron microscopes. They have injected laboratory animals with samples of virtually every body fluid and tissue from AIDS patients, including semen and blood. Not one animal has come down with the disease.”]
They didn’t see it because it isn’t there. The particles that are called “HIV” only show up when you artificially stimulate immune cells taking from people with AIDS with chemicals. That was Gallo’s big “breakthrough” in 1984.
In this point of view, a positive HIV antibody test indicates nothing more and nothing less than a stressed immune system from any number of toxic or infectious causes. That’s why I wouldn’t volunteer to be injected with HIV+ blood- because the HIV positive test indicates a likelihood that the blood comes from a sick person. HIV tests are great for screening donated blood precisely because they’re unspecific.
BBC medical correspondent Neville Hodgkinson has written a very lucid article that explains the position of the AIDS skeptics. Worth reading.
http://www.altheal.org/overview/scivircatastrophe.htm
I just wish Serge Lang could be convinced. But he wouldn’t be as entertaining a figure walking around math departments then.
Those are very good points you make though about the studies being easy to carry out. I think this AIDS dissidence was plausible in 1987 maybe, but really not today. It was good for Lang and others to stand up for these views back then, but there should be some conceivable evidence that would make them change their minds.
Yes, the studies would be very easy to carry out. AIDS Skeptics have been calling for them to be carried out since 1987. And for the last 18 years, nothing has happened. You know what happens when a scientist who is critical of the HIV theory applies for a grant to carry out studies to test the HIV theory?
He or she gets turned down.
The unfortunate reality is that you cannot carry out large clinical studies without the cooperation of the medical establishment and significant funds. The medical establishment has been stonewalling for 18 years, because they have nothing to gain and everything to lose from those studies.
I find this situation as unsatisfactory as you do. It’s a terrible situation that the same claims and counter-claims are being endlessly repeated year after year, decade after decade, while decisive studies that could have resolved this controversy long ago are not being performed. But that’s the situation. You can’t blame dissidents for that. The blame goes to a medical establishment that has turned AIDS science into AIDS theology.
AZT was emphatically not approved because it showed dramatic benefits. The trial was arbitrarily stopped at a time when AZT was slightly ahead. You can fix any tight race by stopping it at a moment when your favourite contestant is temporarily ahead. But that’s not the only reason why this entire trial was one big fraud.
Since AZT in the kind of doses that were used back then causes life-threatening anemia, subjects in that study knew almost immediately who was and wasn’t on AZT. They started sharing pills, believing that AZT would save their lifes. There was therefore no placebo control. And that’s still not all.
To get an appreciation of the enormity of the scientific fraud committed in getting AZT approved, I suggest you read John Lauritson’s articles
FDA Documents show fraud in AZT trial
AZT on Trial
One more general comment- AZT is a DNA chain terminator. It’s a fake genetic letter that is designed to break strands of DNA and thus shut down DNA synthesis. It’s not a “targeted” drug. It just kills cells, indiscriminately. It especially kills the rapidly dividing cells of the bone marrow and the digestive tract, thereby causing chronic diarrhea, weight loss, fever, low T cells, skin rash, malnutrition and susceptibility to infectious diseases.
Sounds familiar? Those symptoms are called “AIDS”. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe the 1994 edition of the “Physician’s Desk Reference” that states that it is
“often difficult to distinguish adverse events possibly associated with zidovudine [AZT] administration from the underlying signs of HIV disease”
It is true that AIDS patients who are given AZT at first experience an increase in T cells. It’s a defense reaction of the body against the bone marrow destruction. It tries to compensate by producing more T-cells.
By the way, it would be nice if you could not call AIDS skeptics “denialists”. Our position is based on reason and empirical data, not the psychological condition of denial. I live in a monogamous relationship. I tested HIV- twice. I have nothing to be in denial about. My interest in this subject is purely intellectual and humanitarian.
If by “slightly ahead” you mean “dropping mortality rates by a factor of 14, after six months, and with p<.01 (I.e. a probability of less than 1% that the difference between the experiment and control groups were due to random factors)", then yes, you are correct. Have you read the FDA's NDA?
But there was no placebo control! People knew who was on the placebo and who was on AZT because the latter group needed blood transfusions for anemia. Those who were getting AZT thus had the placebo effect aiding their healths, while those who were not were concversely afflicted by the nocebo effect. That is a natural alternative explanation for these results, even if they were true.
John Lauritson’s research into science fraud committed in AZT approval leads me to believe that drops in mortality observed due to AZT are fictional anyway.
I have not read the the new drug application that was submitted for AZT.
Oh, and get this. It’s so good, I can’t resist quoting it in full.
http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/jlfraud.htm
Patient #1009: from AZT to placebo
The real bombshell in Patricia Spitzig’s Establishment Inspection Report concerns patient #1009. Before entering the study this patient was suffering from severe anemia and headaches, for which he “was taking Tylenol every four hours without relief of symptoms.” He had received a number of transfusions, the last one only a week before being entered in the study as a placebo patient on 29 May 1986. However, the record for his Week 1 visit on 5 June 1986 states that the patient “was still taking Azidothymidine as of this visit”!
In other words, patient #1009, who was already taking AZT and who was suffering from typical AZT toxicities (severe headaches and anemia), was illegally entered into the study. Patient #1009 was then assigned to the placebo group, although he continued to take AZT. He dropped out of the study after being in it for less than a month, and died on 20 August 1986, two months after leaving the study. He was then counted as a death in the placebo group.
Further comment would be superfluous. If this is not fraud, the word has no meaning.
By the way, some scientific data exists on nutrition and AIDS.
http://www.rethinking.org/aids/cite/topic_121.html
After looking at the results of all of these studies, how could anyone possibly conclude that it isn’t already proven that nutrition makes a profound difference in the clinical prognosis of individuals diagnosed with AIDS? And what does it say about the scientific objectivity of mainstream AIDS science that nutritional supplementation and/or intravenous nutrition is still not standard therapy for people with “HIV” or AIDS?
I invite you to go to the pharmaceutically-sponsored AIDS site Thebody and click on “treatment”. Then look at all the articles: treatment basics skim through some of the articles. How often is nutrion mentioned as an essential part of “anti-HIV” therapy?
I’ll spoil it for you- it isn’t mentioned at all. “Therapy” is synonymous with “drugs, drugs and more drugs”. Yes, there is a separate section on nutrition on the website. But you have to go looking for it. It’s not found in the treatment section. It’s just a subsection in “quality of life” under “all topics”. See, nutrition won’t actually prolong your life, honey. It will just make you *feel* a little better while you pop those miracle pills.
Why is nutrition de-emphasized in favor of drugs, drugs and more drugs? I don’t know. Could have something to do with the fact that TheBody is sponsored by Boehringer-Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline, Gilead, Abbott, Roche and many other pharmaceutical companies.
I read about halfway through the list, maybe a little more. My impression was that in no case was a dramatic reversal of an AIDS patient’s condition documented. If I missed one let me know. It affects the ease of transmission and the rate of decline, to which I say: no duh. Nutrition, particularly dramatic deficits, affects the transmissibility and progress of all sorts of diseases. See our Vitamin C selling industry today and the common cold. This does not constitute an underlying cause.
But if this is a condition that arises out of chronic malnutrition, why didn’t we find it until the 80’s? Rickets, scurvy, etc, the other basic malnutrition diseases, were discovered centuries ago. Do you think something that takes down folks in their 20’s and earlier with obvious skin lesions and brain damage was missed for a couple millenia? Were the drug companies covering up the condition at ancient Rome’s orgies? Or were their bulemic lifestyles so much healthier than modern man’s that it simply didn’t exist then?
I don’t trust drug companies’ motives any more than you do, but I think I have a clearer sense of their power and its limitations, in the US at least, if not elsewhere. I don’t think they have the power to supress scientific studies. They just don’t sponsor them. Academic institutions, the ones that generally run clinical trials, may not be accepting experimental proposals, but that has no obvious profit motive on their part.
The FDA is overworked, understaffed, underfunded, and underpowered (just ask them, they’ll tell you how many more people they need, the long hours they work, their budgetary shortfalls, and how little control they have). My impression is the FDA doesn’t need to approve a study unless it involves new drugs until after the study has been done.
If this idea has a leg to stand on, surely someone, somewhere could fund it. Instead of sending out page after page of claims criticizing current best practices, perhaps they’d like to take the man hours and devote them to fundraising so they can set up their own studies, to prove that current “best practices” are in fact bad ideas.
I read about halfway through the list, maybe a little more. My impression was that in no case was a dramatic reversal of an AIDS patient’s condition documented.
There are several possible reasons for that.
1. Some of these studies look at vitamins in isolation. They supplement a single one and see some improvement, even though the subjects are almost certainly deficient in micronutrients across the board. Only comprehensive supplementation will produce better results.
2. Severely immune deficient individuals are almost always suffering from malabsorption and chronic diarrhea. Oral supplementation is large ineffective in those people, and intravenous delivery is required.
3. Many study participants were undoubtedly taking conventional drugs concurrently. If those drugs are largely responsible for their symptoms in the first place, then spectacular improvement from nutrients cannot be expected until and unless the drugs are discontinued.
4. Nutrients were not selected according to specific alternative theories of AIDS.
What is needed is a large study that compares the performance of conventional drug therapy to comprehensive IV therapy with nutrients selected according to the predictions of specific alternative theories such as the oxidative stress theory of the Perth Group. Then, and only then do I expect to see spectacular results.
But if this is a condition that arises out of chronic malnutrition, why didn’t we find it until the 80’s? Rickets, scurvy, etc, the other basic malnutrition diseases, were discovered centuries ago. Do you think something that takes down folks in their 20’s and earlier with obvious skin lesions and brain damage was missed for a couple millenia?
AIDS skeptics do not claim that AIDS has a single cause. AIDS – according to the CDC – is a “surveilance designation” created to lump together “mysterious” diseases found in IV drug users and promiscuous gay men into one diagnosis. It has different causes in different people, but the main causes are recreational and pharmaceutical drug use and malnutrition. They specifically claim that KS is caused by poppers, which had never been used as a “recreational” drug until the 1970s.
Were the drug companies covering up the condition at ancient Rome’s orgies? Or were their bulemic lifestyles so much healthier than modern man’s that it simply didn’t exist then?
People have always lead unhealthy lifes. But never before in history did a group of people burn the candle from both ends the way some gay men did in the 1970s. They took amphetamines, nitrite inhalants, cocaine and heroin. They had sex with thousands of other men, and they were popping powerful antibiotics like candy, which destroy the intestinal flora and thus lead to malnutrition. John Lauritson – who is gay and knows the sex & drug lifestyle of the 70s first hand- has this to say:
“These men had constant STD infections – concurrent cases of syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, VD, bowel and parasitic infections – which they treated with increasingly strong rounds of antibiotics whenever they thought they’d caught something. Some doctors gave their gay patients open prescriptions for antibiotics and even advised them to swallow a few capsules before going to the baths. One bathhouse in New York sold black market antibiotics on the second floor, along with all kinds of street drugs.”
When these guys predictably became sick, they were treated with more drugs, including cancer chemotherapy for KS. That’s why most of them died within a few months or years. Chemo can finish off even a healthy person in that time. The HIV hypothesis is simply not needed to explain why they died.
I don’t think they have the power to supress scientific studies. They just don’t sponsor them.
Oh yes they do. It’s called the file drawer effect. They run 10 studies on a new drug, and then just publish the 3 where the drug seemed to work and bury the 7 where it didn’t. Don’t take my word for it.
This problem has gotten so bad even the mainstream medical establishment is now belatedly recognizing it.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/06/15/financial1928EDT0375.DTL&type=health
Sorry, this is not the cohesive, point by point post I’d hoped to make, but I’m not inundated with free time. Maybe I’ll revisit the topic later.
Nod…
…that said, I’m coming to think that views on this are like being a liberal vs. conservative, part of the difficulty is that the same research and facts can be positioned very differently and interpreted very differently depending on your point of view.
I was VERY definitely a “mainstream” person for many years and I was probably one of those people who pushed AZT onto the market–I remember nearly being arrested at a protest during Bush I.
More recently, through an admitedly unscientific study (n=1; not me), I’ve started to realize just how f-ed up the AIDS drugs leave people. Your statement about side effects majorly mis-states the reality. Further, the drugs given to treat the side effects create other problems, all leading to something that reminds me of a bad Saturday Night Live sketch about headache remedies.
Those questions found an answer as I started reading that other people were asking some of the same questions I was.
Yeah, hiv meds have serious health consequences. That is not a compelling reason to doubt the hiv theory of aids, though. It is a compelling reason to keep a condom on, regardless of status.
definition required
That is not a compelling reason to doubt the hiv theory of aids, though.
Actually depending on how the theory is formulated, it may be. If one comes to the belief that HIV drugs are systematically worse than the disease, one might question whether there is a disease or not, etc.
Re: definition required
Drug side effects may be a reason not to take the drugs, and for some, may even be a good reason. But it is not a reason to doubt that HIV leads to AIDS in the vast majority of people, if left untreated.
Re: definition required
So ASSUME non-treatement DOES lead to AIDS, does that necessarily lead to bad outcomes vs. treatment?
wow. this was quite a bit to think about. i didn’t know ANY of this. thanks for posting. (including all the comments)
Do you read the Advocate? There was a wonderful tongue in cheek editorial type article in the last issue from someone with HIV.
I’m not inundated with free time.
i’m not either so below is a little gem of wisdom.
stephen,
when are you going to learn not to argue with crazies? if you are standing under a crystal-blue sky and someone points up and says, “the sky is fuchsia with green polka-dots,” you might reasonably respond, “no it’s not, it’s crystal-blue,” but if they continue to insist the sky is fuchsia with green polka-dots you smile, nod, and quickly move on, only looking back if you think they might be violent.
ciao,
david
Your point is well taken. It started off as a request for evidence, then I forgot to let go.