NO SHAME, NO BLAME. JUST DITCH THE BAGGAGE

those pills for a week thinking, ‘am I ready for this?’
“After a week I started taking them and they were awful. I was taking pills four times a day. I spent the first year on the drugs feeling sick all the time - diarrhoea, the usual things.

“Nowadays most regimes are much simpler and easier to take, but back then most drug regimes were three times a day and you had to really concentrate on taking them on time. But I was very good and never missed a dose. The drugs did the trick and my viral load came down to undetectable. So I persevered and I was prepared to put up with the side effects.
“Some time after I moved back to the UK in 1998 I was talking to my doctor and I commented on how the veins were showing in my legs. I’d lost all the subcutaneous fat and wondered whether I was getting that ‘sunken-cheek’ look. We talked through the options, what drugs might be responsible. One option was to stop taking the drugs altogether and wait and see what happened. So I stopped with the expectation that there could be some viral rebound.
“About two weeks after I stopped taking the drugs, I woke up one morning thinking how well I felt. I’d got so used to feeling bad for four years and after stopping I felt fantastic so I’ve stayed off the pills ever since.”
Why do you think your immune system is fighting back without the drugs?
“I put it down to my state of mind. I’m much happier with myself these days. I’ve done a lot of therapy and

I think that has helped.”
Are you worried about drug-resistant HIV?
“All of this is really uncharted territory. Treatment interruption is a very broad term but in my case it paid off. I feel much better and it hasn’t caused me any problems. We were very careful about the sequence of how and when we stopped the drugs because of different concentrations and half-lives to make sure there wasn’t a single drug floating around in my system. But I must stress that although I am trained as a doctor and work for GSK, I am not an HIV specialist.”
Many people have a perception of pharmacos pushing their products to make a profit and encouraging people to go on treatments.
“The big picture is that people need to be encouraged to test and

take treatments when it’s appropriate, but I don’t think Glaxo