@ Dickhead

Your moniker is aptly chosen for a closed one track mind.

On behalf of too many hands held as a prelude to too many funerals for the folks whose lives bought the dream you’re living …I resent the fuck out you using the woe is me… my group is marginalized because some assholes bashed us card as a platform for your agenda.

There’s a lot of gay bashing by indirect reference. “Off label” use goes back to the beginning of the HIV epidemic, before it was obvious that anybody could get or give HIV. And it is still rampant in the designation of “npep” – Non-professional Post Exposure Prophylaxis – as if doctors and nurses are chemically or physically different from other fuckers.

As MikeSouth implied at the beginning of this thread, there is a pile of stuff online at NIH, AIDSmeds, the CDC, IAPAC (International Association of Providers of AIDS Care), and many, many other credible websites – start with the obvious http://bit.ly/107e1AK – and just go further. And it’s not all “off label” or “experimental,” particularly if you look in Canada, the UK and Europe.

“Off Label” use is “experimental”

No other disease or condition has had as much off label and experimental use as HIV. I don’t ascribe to the notion that gays are being sought out and used as Guinea Pigs but absolutely recognize gay (MSM) as most motivated to consider or try off label use of HIV drugs for prevention and treatment.

In 1979 it was still uncommon for cancer patients to ask that they be given experimental treatments for the data and hope it might give science down the road….it was unheard of for docs to suggest patients offer their final weeks and days enduring the medically unknown. Five years later the “first do no harm” of the Hippocratic Oath took on new meaning with docs routinely offering AIDS patients the option of potentially and often known to be harmful treatments with the hope their suffering (harm) might ease the expected harm of contagion not present with then known cancers.

Ten years later it was becoming increasingly unethical for docs to ask HIV/AIDs patients to use untested drugs outside of a study. Ten years after that they had a handle on treatment and started thinking in terms of prevention. Today prevention and treatment are well studied but not commonly practiced.

Removing the stigma and getting to basics…Breast cancer isn’t exclusive to women but as the primary affected group that’s where trials, studies and off label use is initiated. HIV isn’t exclusive to gay (MSM) but as the primary affected group… Both groups include large numbers of motivated individuals willing to push the odds for a greater good and neither is targeted as guinea pigs.

Shalom!

They’re not “guinea pigs” – the drug’s gone through over 10 years of trials. It is … just about time. And it’s not a “serum,” it’s a pill. And there are alternatives, largely less legal, that come from many countries. Most anti-virals that work to kill the virus also kill the transmission. The challenge is in the testing – it often takes too long to verify an infection – and in timely treating.