HIV and AIDS: Myths vs. medicine

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HIV and AIDS: Myths vs. medicineAlternative MedicineOn the Edge with Burton GoldbergHIV and AIDS: Myths vs. medicineWhile Western medicine has spent $50 billion in research futilely focusingon a virus that by itself does not cause the disease, alternative physicianshave quietly made tremendous progress in treating AIDS.A little more than two years ago, the leader of an African nation wasuniversally attacked in the world press for being an "enemy of the people,"espousing a policy of "genocide" and letting "babies die in pain."Was this a monster supporting terrorists, experimenting with weapons of massdestruction or waging war on minorities in his country? No, it was ThaboMbeki, president of South Africa. His "crime" was suggesting that hiscountry review the safety of AIDS drugs.Then, adding fuel to the controversy, in March 2000, President Mbeki invitedabout 30 HIV-AIDS researchers to his presidential AIDS panel in Pretoria,including two American biochemists, Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick. Thesetwo Ph.D.s from the University of California at Berkeley are vocaldissidents of conventional thinking about HIV and AIDS. It is obvious thatMbeki is no monster, but is he misinformed and misguided to question thesafety of AIDS drugs and the absolute equation HIV = AIDS?It was April 23, 1984, when Robert Gallo, M.D., of the National CancerInstitute, announced that he had found the "probable cause of AIDS." It was,he said, a new retrovirus that he named HTLV-III (human T-cell lymphotropicvirus III), which was later renamed HIV. Gallo's evidence for this claim wasnot the actual isolation of a virus, but the detection of antibodies in mostbut not all AIDS patients that he and his colleagues had analyzed. (Itturned out that Luc Montagnier, M.D., of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, hadprovided Gallo with sample virus evidence the previous year, and is nowgiven credit as the "co-discoverer of HIV.")So great was the horror and hysteria surrounding AIDS that this announcementwas immediately greeted not as a probable hypothesis but as fact by themedia and public. There were protests from the very outset over this leap offaith, however, voiced by some very prominent researchers.One of them was Kary Mullis, Ph.D., who received the 1993 Nobel Prize inchemistry for the invention of the Polymerase Chain Reaction test, amainstay of AIDS research technology. In 1992 he stated, "Nobody in theirright mind would jump into this thing like [Gallo et al.] did. It hadnothing to do with any well-considered science. There were some people whohad AIDS and some of them had HIV not even all of them. So they had acorrelation. So what?" Actually, scientists from prestigious institutionsall over the world pointed out many inconsistencies and contradictions inthe "HIV = AIDS" theory.But, as Mbeki himself stated in a letter he wrote to then-President Clinton,there was a "campaign of intellectual intimidation and terrorism" akin to"medieval book-burning" to keep alternative theories about the causes of thedisease from being heard. There are two so-called AIDS tests the ELISA(enzyme linked immunosorbant assay) and the Western Blot test. Neither ofthese tests detect the virus; they detect antibodies that the body canproduce in response to a number of stimuli.False HIV positives have been caused by at least 66 documented unrelatedhealth conditions, medications and other factors, including food allergies,vaccinations, blood transfusions, proteins on test filter paper and a hostof other viruses, bacteria and parasites. Note also that antibodies are nota sign of an active infection or disease they are only a sign that at onetime our body produced an immune response to an antigen.There were and are other cogent technical arguments against the HIV = AIDStheory, coming from internationally renowned pathologists and virologists.There are, for example, human populations who test HIV positive but neverdevelop any symptoms of AIDS. Dr. Mullis references a United Nations study:"The World Health Organization studied prostitutes in a little coastalAfrican country above Liberia. They found that 75% of the prostitutes wereHIV-positive and predicted that five years later half of them would be dead.In five years they came back and there were no bodies to count. Still thepositives are HIV positive, according to their tests." Further, in animalstudies, there are more than 125 chimpanzees that were inoculated with theAIDS virus more than 15 years ago who have never developed AIDS.The HIV = AIDS theory violates the fundamental standards used to determinewhether a particular organism causes a specific disease. These rules arecalled "Koch's Postulates," and were established over 100 years ago byGerman bacteriologist Robert Koch (pronounced "Koke"), who determined thecauses of tuberculosis, anthrax and other diseases. These rules are 1) Thesuspected organism has to be present in each and every case of the disease,and in sufficient quantities to cause disease; 2) The agent cannot be foundin other diseases and 3) After isolation and propagation, the agent caninduce the disease when transmitted to another host.HIV fails all three postulates: It is not present in every AIDS-likedisease; it is not found in one but in 30 distinct diseases; and chimpanzeesinoculated with HIV have consistently failed to develop AIDS, even after aslong as 15 years. What this points to is that there are cofactors other thanHIV that are necessary to cause AIDS that HIV by itself does not cause AIDS.Even Dr. Montagnier, the co-discoverer of HIV, stated at the SixthInternational Conference on AIDS in 1990 that he no longer believed HIV byitself could cause AIDS without the help of one or several cofactors.Yet all conventional medical research has focused on killing or preventingthe replication of HIV. And, as President Mbeki observed, no vaccine hasbeen developed and no cure has been found, nor is one even in sight. Somemay argue that with highly active combination antiretroviral therapy (HAART)the famous AIDS cocktail of protease-inhibiting drugs that suppress thereplication of HIV life expectancies have dramatically increased. Isn't thisproof that HIV causes AIDS?One must ask, however, is the general delay in the onset of AIDS symptomsfollowing HIV infection due to these drugs, or are other factors at work? Infact, some alternative physicians who have success treating AIDS useanti-HIV drugs extremely judiciously both to minimize toxicity and to avoidcreating resistance and use drugs not as the primary modality but as anadjunct to other therapies.Jon D. Kaiser, M.D., of Marin County, California, is one such physician. Hehas treated HIV infections and AIDS patients in his private practice for 15years. Dr. Kaiser's latest book, published in 1999, is Healing HIV: How toRebuild Your Immune System. Dr. Kaiser does believe that HIV issubstantially involved in AIDS, but he uses antiviral drugs with thelightest touch possible. He practices what he calls a comprehensive healingprogram, which consists of customized recommendations from each of sevencategories: 1) diet; 2) vitamins and nutritional supplements; 3) herbs andacupuncture; 4) individualized exercise programs; 5) stress reduction; 6)hormone balancing and 7) medical therapies (including antiviral and anti-HIVdrugs).How successful is Kaiser's program? Kaiser boldly states that "theprogression of HIV disease in my practice is an extremely rare event."During the past five years, he says, caring for 500 HIV-positive patients,not one patient who came to see him with a CD4 (T cell) count of greaterthan 300 cells per cubic millimeter of blood has progressed to below thatlevel, and not one patient who came to him with a CD4 count of greater than50 has become seriously ill or died from an HIV-related illness. Dr. Kaisersays that many of his patients "feel better now than they ever have duringtheir entire lives. This holds true whether they are taking antiviral drugsor not." Most people with HIV, he says, can now hope to live normal, healthylives for what amounts to a normal lifespan.How is this possible? One important thing to remember is that people don'tdie of AIDS: They die of any of 30-odd conditions to which AIDS makes themsusceptible by degrading their immune systems. All these diseases existedbefore the term AIDS was coined and HIV was discovered. If someone dies whohas one or more of these conditions and is HIV positive, their death iscalled an AIDS fatality. However, if someone with one or more of theseconditions dies who is not HIV positive, then that death is ascribed simplyto the condition itself. Among HIV-positive people, the onset of AIDS andthe manifestations of the disease vary enormously but do show distinctpatterns that correlate strongly with lifestyle.Drs. Duesberg and Rasnick, for example, claim that recreational andpharmaceutical drug use is a common denominator for more than 95% of allAmerican and European AIDS patients. Further, their data shows thatdifferent drugs seem to cause distinct AIDS-related diseases. For instance,they claim that nitrite inhalants ("poppers," extensively used by gay men inthe '70s and '80s) cause Kaposi's sarcoma (cancerous skin lesions onlyrarely seen in heterosexuals); cocaine causes weight loss; and AZT causesimmunodeficiency, lymphoma, muscle atrophy and dementia.There are doctors and researchers who believe that antiretroviral drugs canalso do more harm than good. "I have a large population of people who havechosen not to take any antiretrovirals," says Donald Abrams, M.D., directorof the AIDS program at San Francisco General Hospital. "They've watched alltheir friends go on the antiviral bandwagon and die." A study published inthe New England Journal of Medicine in 1995 showed that one of the thingsthat long-term AIDS survivors had in common was that they didn't takeantiretroviral drugs. Leanna Standish, N.D., Ph.D., coeditor of AIDS andComplementary and Alternative Medicine: Current Science and Practice,disputes this, citing improvements in antiviral therapies since 1996. Whiledefinitely an alternative-minded physician, she emphatically states, "Highlyactive combination antiretroviral therapy has made it possible for manydesperately ill men and women with AIDS who are also HIV-seropositive [feel]well enough to get up from their wheelchairs and sickbeds."Whether alternative doctors use antiretroviral drugs as part of theirtherapy or not, addressing drug use and the immune system damage it causesis as important or even more important than addressing the HIV itself. Thisis a fundamental difference between conventional and alternative medicine.Conventional medicine treats the symptoms of disease, while alternativemedicine treats the patient.The disease syndrome we now call AIDS first came to our attention as anepidemic in the gay community. It was, in fact, originally called GRIDGay-Related Immune Deficiency. The HIV virus was spread through sexualcontact (and also among intravenous drug users who shared needles). Many gaymen in the '70s and '80s practiced a lifestyle that included frequentrecreational drug use and multiple sex partners with the concomitantsexually transmitted diseases and use of antibiotics. (Semen itself isantigenic [provoking an immune-response], and when received in quantity isimmunosuppressive.) All of these factors severely compromise the immunesystem, leaving individuals with few natural resources to controlinfections.AIDS in Africa, however, is an entirely different story. There, HIV isepidemic throughout the entire population. The immunosuppressive agents forAfricans are not drugs or promiscuity but malnutrition and the presence ofbacteria and parasites, widespread because of a lack of public healthsanitary measures. Thus, HIV-positive Africans develop AIDS at a differentrate than Americans or Europeans. Duesberg states that in Africa, one AIDScase is diagnosed for every 300 HIV positives, while in the United Statesthe ratio is one AIDS case for every 20 HIV positives.He ascribes American HIV positives' 15-fold greater AIDS risk to Western'smedicine's reliance on toxic anti-HIV drugs. Neither do Africans usually dieof the same AIDS-related illnesses as Americans and Europeans do, such aspneumocystis pneumonia. In Africa, AIDS usually manifests as a wastingdisease, consistent with the diarrheal infections and malnutrition presentthere. Thus it was that President Mbeki was not inclined to combat hiscountry's AIDS epidemic by meekly purchasing millions of dollars' worth ofAZT. Instead, he insisted that the basic issue for South Africa was one ofpoverty, which caused malnutrition and sanitation problems. In a meetingwith President Bush in June 2001, Mbeki repeated his assertion that "in manyinstances, these are diseases which are not only caused by poverty, some ofthem, but also cause poverty." I have been aware of these facts for manyyears.In 1994 I published a book with Leon Chaitow, N.D., D.O., You Don't Have toDie: Unraveling the AIDS Myth. In its preface we stated, "We do not believe,based on the evidence we have seen and which we will outline, that HIV is asufficient single cause of AIDS. Nor do we believe that being HIV-positiveleads inevitably to AIDS, or that AIDS is necessarily irreversible. We dobelieve that enhancement and modulation of immune function presents anopportunity for recovery of health. We sincerely believe that this approachwill be increasingly adopted as the HIV myth is discredited, and that wewill look back and wonder why billions of dollars have been wasted inHIV-oriented research." Currently, approximately 7,000 people worldwide dieof AIDS every day. At least their deaths are attributed to AIDS. In reality,they had tested positive for HIV and died of any of 30 AIDS-relateddiseases. Given the acknowledged unreliability of HIV testing, however, thisnumber could be wildly off.Nevertheless, 7,000 people die each day of something that conventionalmedical treatment couldn't help or quite possibly helped bring on. We dohave the knowledge and techniques to prevent this from happening, but not ifwe stay with the bankrupt thinking that AIDS is one disease with one causethat will be cured with one drug.In looking for the origin of AIDS in Africa, researchers found that largepopulations of apes and wild cats were infected with "AIDS-like" virusesthat had the potential to destroy their immune systems. The animals' bloodwas full of these viruses, killing significant numbers of blood cells, butthey never manifested any disease symptoms. What does this tell us about thenature of these retroviruses, which many researchers claim could never wreakall the damage that is ascribed to them? HIV is simply a virus, likehundreds of other viruses we've lived with for as long as humanity has beenon the planet. Most people have been exposed to influenza viruses,cytomegalovirus, herpes and Epstein-Barr.It is all but impossible to eradicate these infections; they can only becontrolled. They do their damage when our immune systems are not up to thetask. Trying to cure diseases by focusing on the development of toxicpharmaceutical drugs aimed at killing the viruses associated with them willultimately make us all more vulnerable to new diseases. President Bushrecently pledged an additional $200 million in AIDS funding over the nexttwo years. Global activists think that the U.S. should contribute $2.5billion. Without a paradigm shift in the way we approach AIDS, however, thismoney will not only be wasted, but could do more harm than good.