I'm going to address several things here from other comments, but first the IP's questions.
If PrEP makes you bareback without worrying about HIV, what do you do about the other STDs? I know that a few shots will fix it but still, no infections are good.
WHen you play any other sport--and sex is definitely a sport for the guys on here--you take on risks of injury great and small. Most STD's can be treated with antibiotics, though some are becomming more resistant to what we have available. Other's like herpes or HEP-C are treatable but not curable. I would hope that any HEP-C person would disclose themselves as such, at least until a HEP-C vaccine is finally perfected. BUt, like a twisted ankle or broken arm in football, these are the risks in out sport.
When on PrEP, do you feel you have to have sex more often to justify taking the medications? Otherwise, why take PrEP sex is you are not having sex very often?
No. I have a huge sex appetite and have a lot of sex anyway so nothing really changes there.
What happens after PrEP? Or are you planning to be on PrEP for life? It must be tough to be fucking freely on PrEP and then for some reason you have to stop, and you forget you stopped PrEP. You have to re-adjust to not being on PrEP.
PrEP will go on for awhile but as new discoveries are made it's entirely possible that this process will be replaced in the future, such as if the HIV vaccine research going on finally is successful.
Now to address a few other points to the non-medical people above. HIV as a virus is a weak virus in actuality. THe key factor that makes it less virulent than other viruses is that during the replication process there is a "spell checker" that reviews the newly assembled RNA strand for accuracy against what it is supposed to be. HIV has no such "spell checker" and as a result many of its reproductions lead to nothing. That said, this same unchecked process could potential lead to a more virulent version of HIV, but even then, without a spell checker for the replication process its effects may be limited.
Given the number of patient I see that have diabetes, obesity, and/or cardiovascular disease and continue to just take medication because it is easier than actually fixing their diet and doing some exercise in spite of the mountain of studies that show how diet and exercise can reverse all those conditions, I have no trouble commencing PrEP so I can freely fuck like an animal.
Also, the reason the price is so high is because we have no price controls in this country. The discount cards for you at patient level exist so you can still get the medicaiton cheaply but the drug maker can still bill the insurance at the inflated price they are charging. Drug development has ZERO to do with drug pricing and everything to do with what the market will bear (much the same way for the insane cost tickets at Disney World). Drug development cost is a smoke screen the companies hide behind. As long as they are spending literally millions of dollars to advertise their drugs to the medically uneducated public on television they cannot use this defense and have it be credible; no one outside of medicine really needs the advertising (which is how it was for decades before DTC ads were made legal in the late 1990's.