So I'm staring at a prescription for Atripla...

[Miss Philicia]

my rebound from a dreadful 12% to almost 40% in less than a year. 

Oh, that is impressive.  It took me 13 years to get that high and I began with 14%.

[Miss Philicia]

That's why I go all the way to Liverpool as that jerk is the only one available on the Rock.

Which just goes to show you do indeed live in a FAKE COUNTRY.

[Rev. Moon]

Oh, that is impressive.  It took me 13 years to get that high and I began with 14%.

That's why I love my Atripla, and why I don't regret starting meds as early as I did. 

[Nestor]

Another way to approach this is to stop waiting for your doctor to "inform" you of things.  I ask for a copy of my lab report each visit and never hesitate to ask questions if I see something that doesn't make sense to me.  I also will question my doctor -- in fact, after 5 yrs together he routinely asks for my thoughts on things.  
Now, as many know, I do have a medical background, so that helps -- but I also have approached my ID doctor as my PARTNER in health from the get-go.  He's got more experience and knowledge than I, but that doesn't give him the last word.  He wanted to put me on one regimen, I didn't like what he had in mind so we discussed and I went on a different one.

Bottom-line -- if you don't act like a partner in the relationship, you might not get treated like one.

Mike

nestor, i'm surprised that with all the hiv related research that you've done that you never knew that about cd4%. do you ask your doc for copies of your labs?...cd4% should be right on the report.  in part, that's why i had specifically suggested that all factors need to be considered in considering the meds game issues we discussed in another thread. follow your own advice, brother...take initiative. i'm glad that you now know the importance of it.

Believe me, I was surprised too.  But some of the implications are surprising.  I certainly have not "waited for my doctor to inform me of things", "hesitated to ask questions", or fail to "take initiative".  For the record, I think I spent most of the very first day after I found out I had HIV online, googling and reading articles about it.  I discovered this website very early (the news and blogs; somehow these forums escaped my attention for the first few years) and for a couple of years I clicked on the "treatment news" section, religiously, every day, hoping that some breakthrough would be announced.  (finally it occured to me that if anything of major importance did occur, I would probably see it in the New York Times as soon.)  I certainly read a lot of the "lessons" as well.  When I did finally discover these forums I read very widely in them.  As for conversations with my doctor, I don't think I've ever had a visit with her that did not involve a long conversation about some relevant issue.  And yet, in May 2009, when she mentioned CD4 percentage, it was something I'd never heard of before.  Short of ending every conversation by asking "Is there any aspect of HIV that you haven't told me about?" and giving a suspicious, penetrating look, I'm not sure what more I could have done that I didn't do.  

All of this started when I suggest to WTF that the percentage was not among the very most important things.  Whether that is correct or not, I certainly did not mean to suggest that it was unimportant.  Mainly, I was trying to understand why so many doctors (judging by the large number of people who do not know about their percentage) do not talk about it.  I speculated that, faced with someone newly diagnosed, a doctor does not want to overwhelm him with too many details at once.  I can understand a doctor saying "let's just give the broad outlines now; there'll be time to fill in the details later, bit by bit."  But that fails when the doctor in question is pushing the patient into making a major decision; in that case the patient ought to be given every relevant bit of information.  

[Nestor]

2. Please do not second guess your doctor on the basis of this forum.  If you legitemately do not want to start meds, gather info from here and have a conversation.  I'm not a doc, but I can imagine nothing is more annoying than a non-compliant patient.

Every time I hear that word I remember a passage from "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down".  It's Anne Fadiman's account of a girl with severe epilepsy whose parent's don't agree with the medicines prescribed for her and don't consistently give them to her.  (It turns out towards the end that the parents might have been right after all.)  The family have the girl taken away from them on grounds of "non-compliance".  Things end tragically.  Towards the end of the book Fadiman has a conversation with a Dr. Kleinman about what might be done to avert such tragedies.  One thing he says:

"First, get rid of the term "compliance".  It's a lousy term.  It implies moral hegemony.  You don't want a command from a general, you want a colloquy."  (p. 261)