It's OK to stop taking AIDS meds: LOTTI Study

The LOTTI study found that patients who interrupted their highly active retroviral therapy (HAART) drugs for AIDS fared as well as those who took the toxic drugs continuously. In fact, more than one-fourth of those who quit their drugs never needed to start taking them again!
Structured Intermittent Therapy (STI) lowered the effects of toxicity, reduced treatment cost, and did not result in drug resistance.
Pharma funded AIDS sites, such as thebody.com, poz.com and aidsmed.com, are not actively informing their readers of the exciting results from this randomized, controlled, prospective study, which was published in the journal AIDS. Information is an essential component for making informed decisions.
Read more at my blog: http://resistanceisfruitful.com

Greetings, good evening. This is my second youtube video.

Tonight i'm wanting to talk a little bit about a study I recently read.

As I mentioned in my

other video and

blogs I quit my AIDS drugs about six years ago,

so i find reports like this of great interest.
The study is called LOTTI

and that's L-O-T-T-I,

stands for LOng-Term Treatment Interruption.

The study recently reported that those of us who have had success with treatment interuptions,

or "vacations"

might not be all that unusual

There are two groups in the study which was done in Italy.

They were all

patients taking

HAART, Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy

or the "AIDS cocktails"

and one group took the drugs continuously—that was one arm—the second arm

took vacations, or interrupted their therapy,

based on CD4 counts.

The counts used in this study

were 700...

at 700 CD4 count

patients on the STI (structured treatment interruption) arm could

quit their drugs until their CD4 count dropped to

350 or lower, at which time they

would restart

their drug treatment.

What was really cool about this study is that

over a fourth of the
0:01:32.440,0:01:34.870
patients in the STI arm,

when they

quit their drugs, they never had to restart,

which has been my strategy since I quit the drugs six years ago.

Though i would use a little bit different numbers for the CD4 counts,perhaps.

The study

really offers hope to people who are either taking, or facing

the choice of taking antiretroviral drugs

because of their concern for long-term effects or perhaps they are experiencing illness

because of the toxicities.

There really are no good reasons

for HAART patientsto stay on the drugs continuously

and indefinitely and there are several advantages
to stopping them.

There is reduced toxicity

There were more cardiologicalproblems due to the effects of drug toxicity

in the continuous arm

than there were in the STI arm.

And these problems

are well-known. The modern clinical practice is to simply prescribed

even more

drugs

to deal with the effects.

The other

known affect of

continuous

HAART drug use includes disfiguring body effects

like lipdystrophy,

liver disease, bone problems, and aberrant blood levels

with lipids, enzymes and hormones.

The big boogie man most frequently used to try to discourage

patients from interrupting their HAART treatment

is drug resistance.

The LOTTI study

found that

drug resistance was higher in the continuous group.

than it was in the STI group.

In other words, being

off the drugs didn't cause resistence, but being on them did.

There is only one patient in the STI arm who developed resistance

and that was while they were taking the drug, supposedly after achieving viral suppression.

So this really contradicts the

common wisdom that's usually heard

in the doctor's offices.

CD4counts.

While about the same number of patients in each arm reached one of the so-called primary endpoints,

which in this study

was defined as death or disease those in the contiuous arm had a mean CD4 count of

891, almost 900,

compared to 557 in the STI arm.o

So, having higher

level of CD4 counts, in this study at any rate,

did not result in lowering

either death or disease. So much for the

protective power of high CD4 counts.

The daily drug costs...

treatment cost for patients on the STI arm

was less than half that of the continuous drug group.

Now, cost alone should never be

the determining factor in treatment choices,

but there never seems to be enough money

to fuel the AIDS machine, so

this is an important finding too.

The other study that's or

pretty widely quoted when

drug vacations or structured treatment
interruptions are

mentioned,

is the SMART study, which was funded

by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

This was an international study with over 5400 patients

in 33 countries. The study was terminated early

because supposedly of too many deaths and adverse affects. What's really strange

about this study is that

79 of those 85 deaths

occurred in the U.S.

even those only 55% of the patients in the study were from the U.S.

These and other weird aberrations about this study are mentioned in a link

that is in my report on the LOTTI study on my blog,

which I hope

you'll go and actually look at the study itself, and I write a little bit more

about LOTTI

and raise questions about why isn't this

information being

more widely publicized.

You won't find

any promotion of of the

information from LOTTIon the pharmaceutical funded

AIDS sites like AIDS.com...

AIDSmeds.com, poz.com.

thebody.com...

which is which is just

inexcusable to me.

I know of friends and other people who are on HAART,

and i support their choices in the decision to take

those drugs.

My point is that

decisions...

we need information

to make informed decisions.

This is important information that every person

who is facing

this choice should have.

I know people who are

having problems with the drugs but are

scared to death, basically, to quit

and

we need more

of this type of encouragement

that there's really not...

there's not as much to lose

to give it a try now and it doesn't work, you can go back on the drugs.

If it does,

you might never have to

go back on them.

That's my hope, at any rate

Go check out the blog. Its

resistanceisfruitful.com (new URL)

There's a link to in on the youtube page here.

Read the study, read my report, feel free to comment.

Thanks.