Wednesday, September 29, 2010

ARV's = chemotherapy

Very interesting paper:

"Chemotherapy and radiotherapy, whilst highly effective in the treatment of neoplasia, can also cause damage to healthy tissue. In particular, the alimentary tract may be badly affected. Severe inflammation, lesioning and ulceration can occur."

"Th disruption or loss of rapidly dividing epithelial progenitor cells is a trigger for the onset of the disorder." 

"Severe inflammation, lesioning, ulceration and bleeding can occur in the mouth, esophagus, and intestine."

"...ability to absorb nutrients much reduced..."

Hummmm, I wonder what 11 years of chemo-compound drugs will do to the intestinal tract? These were short term results done on cancer patients.


https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B6MdtNnmbsfZMDYxZjcyMDktZDkzYS00Mzc1LTljYWUtNmZjYWRhNTU3OWZi&hl=en&authkey=CKvZmb8C

4 comments:

  1. Only one remark - the phrase

    "whilst highly effective in the treatment of neoplasia"

    is really a shameless exaggeration. Chemotherapy has, in actual controlled studies, been found to be about 2 to 3% effective. Such low efficacy would be unacceptable in any other form of treatment. But apparently in cancer therapy, this is called "highly effective".

    For a discussion of this aspect, see

    http://www.icnr.com/articles/ischemotherapyeffective.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am a little confused. Did you go thru chemotherapy? Did you also have cancer at the same time as HIV? Or are you saying antriretrovirals are chemo? Because they are not. ARVs are highly specific meds. Each class targets specific enzymes that HIV requires to replicate. They do not indiscriminately kill other cells. ARVs and chemo drugs are not even close pharmacologically.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous, please see my new post to address your above confusion.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "The caveat in all this is that these drugs are toxic. And the lesson of cancer chemotherapy is that the longer you take the drugs, the greater the toxicity. It's cumulative...That may not be a problem, if it turns out you only have to take these drugs for two or three years to get full (HIV) suppression. But if the time scale is three to forty years, you will reach toxicity."
    Robert Gallo interview with Newsday.

    ReplyDelete