Who is still not on med ? And if no, because health issues ?

[BootmanLA]

6 hours ago, dbbp264 said:

Yes, totally true. I have been fucked by  6 UD guys. Asking a UD guy to stop taking their meds is like asking them if they want to commit suicide is what I was told by one guy.

To be perfectly clear: the effects of stopping medication - if the stop is permanent - are pretty clear (you're almost certainly going to die, much sooner than you would otherwise). But stopping otherwise, the science is somewhat less clear.

Back in the day of multi-pill, multi-times-a-day treatments, doctors used to sometimes suggest a "meds holiday" - the early HIV treatments were a lot more toxic to the rest of your body, and as a result, taking a break for a few months, every few years, made some sense - especially since the medication landscape was regularly changing and there were frequently newer medications to try. The breaks allowed the body's other organs, especially the liver and kidneys, to get some respite from filtering out the medications' residue.

Nowadays the medications used are less toxic and are calibrated more carefully to be (when taken daily) as otherwise innocuous to your system as possible. And innovations in treatment by medicine seem to be coming a bit slower, with new drugs coming on the market less rapidly than in years past. As a result, there may not be as many other medications to try if you take a break from meds and then, upon resumption, your old medication doesn't seem to be as effective.

That doesn't mean that if someone wants to stop taking meds for, say, 3-6 months, he's inevitably going to die fairly soon. Someone whose system was already severely compromised by HIV before beginning treatment, like @ErosWired, might find himself at death's door after 3 months off meds. That's because some of the damage done by HIV once it's fairly advanced may not be reversible; treatment can perhaps postpone the inevitable (ie death) indefinitely, but there's far less leeway for error. On the other hand, someone whose system was solid and who begins treatment immediately after infection is discovered might well be able to have occasional medication holidays without extensive long-term damage. We don't know, really, because there's not really an ethical way to study that.