I am writing to encourage the opening of the "AIDS debate" to include the life experience of a group of "forgotten victims" which Stephen Strauss seems completely unaware.
Perhaps "victim" is not the correct term for we are generally a healthy group, and victims not of a retrovirus but of social, economic and cultural forces.
We are, however, most definitely "forgotten" for we are consistently excluded from media coverage and scientific research. In fact we do not exist in the dominant imagination. We are people who are living with an "HIV" or "AIDS" diagnosis who refuse pharmaceutical treatments and resist the hex which our allopathic doctors have cast upon us. What we have survived is our initial encounters with allopathic medicine and AIDS Inc.
Some of us have been living over two decades after our life threatening diagnosis. Many of us are now rethinkers who recognize our mistake in taking an "HIV test". All of us were denied the necessary information to give informed consent to such non-specific tests.(1)
While we were usually once believers in "HIV", to our credit we did our own research and made our own choices about our health and treatments. We did not follow doctors orders and begin AZT or any of the other pharmaceutical treatments now lumped together in a "cocktail". We did not start corticosteroids or antibiotics to prevent disease. Today, in fact, many of us live in health without an allopathic doctor altogether, as we soon learnt that each visit to the doctor turned into a session of being beaten down to start "meds" based on the meaningless surrogate markers of CD4 counts and "viral load".(2) These "meds" are also prescribed without the full range of information necessary to give informed consent to treatment.
We invisible "victims" live on and perhaps some of us take even better care of ourselves than average for the simple reason that going to an orthodox allopathic doctor can be one of the greatest risks there is to our health. Some of us have lucked out and discovered a dissident physican. Generally we visit naturopaths, TCM practicioners, homeopaths, or traditional healers, and we study the role of nutrition and psychology in health. We seek treatment only for the illnesses we do have - not our imagined "HIV" infection.
The moment we speak up we are, of course, easy targets to be dismissed as in "denial". The truth is allopathic medicine, "HIV" science, politicians, mainstream media and rock stars are in denial over our existence. Nobody has yet counted how many of us there are and how many of us are research-based dissidents versus people who have decided to go their own route, believing in "HIV" but not the usefulness of the toxic disabling drugs now seen as the standard of care.
I was diagnosed "HIV+" in 1999 and was surprised as I had no recent "risks" to worry about. At that stage I had been testing regularly (as many gay men do no matter what their relationship status) since 1987. I did not question the results at the time. It was only later I learned that when I took the "HIV test" I had at least six conditions known to cause "false positives" on the Elisa or Western Blot tests.
Initially, I did not question it when instead of retesting my doctor immediately began monitoring my CD4 count and "viral load". Later when I began to question my positive test and the fact that a PCR test was used to confirm my diagnosis, I came to the realization that my doctor knew nothing about the tests he was ordering, the drugs he was pressuring me to start, or the deadly psychological impact of his diagnosis.
In 2001 my doctor declared me disabled because of "HIV depression" noting on the form that "HIV" was "untreatable". Thankfully, I never took up his offer to have myself declared disabled, although it would have erased a disabling student loan. The depression lifted when I began reading the stories of "long-term survivors" like Christine Maggiore of Alive & Well(3) and the publications of dissident scientists like the Perth Group.(4) I also became an active member of AIDS webboards.
Today I frankly find myself living in an Orwellian nightmare. "HIV+" dissidents are, of course, subject to the same discrimination and oppression as all people deemed to be "living with HIV or AIDS".
I have come to accept I cannot travel a few miles south from my Canadian home and cross into the USA. I accept I will never qualify for a mortgage or life insurance, and hence never own my own home. I accept that I need any potential "sero-negative" sexual partner to sign an informed consent agreement if I want to be certain that our sexual activity does not result in me being charged with "aggravated assault" or worse. I accept paying provincial medical premiums and taxes for so-called universal healthcare I fear to access. I accept that my local PLWHA activist groups and advocates offer nothing for me as I refuse pharmaceutical treatments and do not tow the party line. I accept there are none of the much advertised AIDS Inc. "perks" for the "HIV+" rethinker.
What I refuse to accept is the torture and murder of children with "AIDS meds" as we have recently seen in the case of US foster children used in drug trials in which they were forced to take even higher dosages than normal of the same old toxic drugs, including by way of stomach tubes.(5) I do not accept mothers should lose their children because they do the responsible thing and not only refrain from giving their children the deadly chemotherapy AZT, but also breastfeed.(6)
I do not accept that all is hunky dory in the land of pharmaceutical treatments for "HIV/AIDS". In the late '80s and early '90s many of my gay friends died of what was called "AIDS". The vast majority died of AZT toxicity (primarily liver failures) or committed suicide because they could not handle the drug side effects. These were healthy young men until they tested "positive" and were started on AZT and antibiotics.
By the late '90s my "positive" gay friends were living longer on "cocktails" with much lower dosages of AZT, but they were still succumbing to liver failure. Now heart failure is also common and while they are alive they live with a wide range of disabling side effects from "crix belly" to "buffalo hump".
Anyone who thinks a cut and dried argument about a single risk group can end the "AIDS debate has no connection to the reality faced by those of us diagnosed with "HIV" who reject so-called "standard care". There is no excuse why gay men or children should continue to die on these drugs, particularly since AZT's toxicities have been well documented from the beginning when it was first shelved as too toxic to be used as a cancer chemotherapy.
- "HIV+", CANADA.
References:
1. Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Valendar F. Turner and John M. Papadimitriou, "Is a Positive Western Blot Proof of HIV Infection?" Bio/Technology, vol. 11, June 1993. http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/epwbtest.htm; "Concerns about HIV/AIDS Testing and Measurements"
2. Matt Irwin, "Low CD4+ T Lymphocyte Counts: A variety of causes and their implications to a multifactorial model of AIDS," Feb. 2001, http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/milowcd4.htm; Christine Johnson, "Viral Load and the PCR: Why they can't be used to prove HIV infection," Continuum Nov. 2001,
3. http://www.aliveandwell.org
4. http://www.theperthgroup.com
5. Sam Burcher, "Guinea Pig Kids in AIDS Drug Trials"
6. David Crowe "Medical Fascism? Medical Terrorism? Medical Communism?"