Date:   7/11/2008 11:34:16 AM ( 16 y ago)
Hits:   3,079
URL:   https://www.curezone.org/forums/fm.asp?i=1212766

Hi Healthierlife!

A good rule of thumb: anything that promises to turn you HIV-negative is almost certainly a scam. Is it possible that a true cure (a treatment that eliminated every virion and every HIV-infected cell) could turn you HIV-negative? Yes, after a long enough period of time, it is a possibility. However, there is just as much possibility that you would remain HIV-positive for the rest of your life. At this point, seroreversion (going from HIV+ to HIV-negative) following a cure is purely hypothetical (and since people differ in the persistence of their antibody responses, there would be no guarantee that any particular person would become HIV-negative even if the cure worked). If someone is promising that their cure will turn you HIV-negative, they are making false promises. All other things being equal, I would choose an alternative treatment that does not promise to turn you HIV-negative over one that does. There's no guarantee that one without such promises will work, but there's an extremely high likelihood imo that any treatment that DOES make such promises is a true scam.

It might also interest you to know that in people who are HIV-infected, a negative antibody test might not mean that you were cured (I don't think anyone with HIV should rely on antibody tests to determine whether they've been cured). In advanced AIDS, people are sometimes so immunosuppressed that they lose the ability to make antibodies against HIV. An antibody test would say that they are HIV-negative, even though their blood is teeming with HIV which is killing them. Very very rarely, someone will appear to serorevert while on antiviral therapy. This is so rare that if you were a doctor and this happened to one of your patients, you would be able to publish a case report about it in a scientific journal! I'm thinking of a case report of an HIV+ child who had been on suppressive therapy - the virus could not be detected in her blood (by RNA or DNA PCR) and she was given another antibody test that showed her to be HIV-negative. In order to test that assumption, they took her off of her meds, viral load rebounded, and she again tested positive on a subsequent antibody test. Again, this is an extremely rare case because just about everybody who has been taking antivirals for a long period of time still tests HIV-positive, but it is a cautionary tale about relying on antibody tests to declare a person "cured".

I can relate to the desire to be HIV-negative. I've been comfortable with my status for over a decade, but many years ago, after my husband died, I was single for a while, and I would have given anything to be HIV-negative just to escape the stigma and the difficulties that dating HIV-negative men entailed. Despite that, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that your health-oriented goal in your battle against HIV should NOT be to have a negative result on an antibody test. Whatever your goal (e.g. a long, healthy life; to eventually eradicate HIV from your body with alternative medicine), an antibody test is a very poor way to measure it.

 

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