Try many Cocktails

[bGeek107]

Everyone is different in body alone. Try many cocktails and see how you do on them. How you feel. How your system feels. How your Viral Load is doing. How your T-Cells are doing. Keep your doctor informed as to how you feel. If you feel bad in any way stop one drug for a week and see if that helps. Do this with each drug. If you feel pretty good try lowering the dosage by taking weekend holidays. Keep an eye on your Viral Load and your T-Cells. Keep your doctor informed. I survived by doing this and yelling at my doctors because I didn’t feel well. 

[jkinatl2]

Everyone is different in body alone. Try many cocktails and see how you do on them. How you feel. How your system feels. How your Viral Load is doing. How your T-Cells are doing. Keep your doctor informed as to how you feel. If you feel bad in any way stop one drug for a week and see if that helps. Do this with each drug. If you feel pretty good try lowering the dosage by taking weekend holidays. Keep an eye on your Viral Load and your T-Cells. Keep your doctor informed. I survived by doing this and yelling at my doctors because I didn’t feel well. 

I am all for being the strongest advocate for your own health and quality of life, but it's pretty risky, from a resistance perspective, to decided on your own to remove one drug from a regimen that requires all of the drugs to be effective. Is this what your doctor has recommended?

Evidence does seem to support the notion that, for some drug combos, an adherence rate far lower than 95% is effective. You no doubt are aware that many folks here, with or without approval by their doctors, take drug holidays like the one you mention. Some people even go two weeks on, one week off. And certainly there are drugs in development that will allow this to become standard in the future. I am just concerned that it's a little/lot soon to be advocating it as a widespread recommendation.

[buginme2]

Hogwash

[leatherman]

1) suggesting that a week is enough time to determine anything about medications is too simplistic. It often takes 4-6 weeks for a body to adjust to any medication; much less the results of rising or falling viral load and cd4 counts, and general side effects that might come from simply adjusting to a new medication.

2) removing one medication from a regimen has a big risk factor for allowing HIV replication and/or resistance developing to that medication.

3) while I agree that if you are having issues with a cocktail you should discuss this with your doctor to either compensate for the unwanted side effects or to try a new regimen, trying "many cocktails" is just a recipe for running out of any effective medication to treat your HIV. Any major regimen change should be done with the utmost caution and with sufficient time to thoroughly evaluate the change.

4) if you plan on following any of the OP's suggestions, the most important suggestion is "Keep an eye on your Viral Load and your T-Cells". While therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) can be very expensive, it will be only the way to tell how the OP's other suggestions are actually effecting you and your HIV. (btw TDM usually requires more than 1 wk to truly measure what differences might be happening by starting and stopping meds and by trying as many regimens as possible.)

[mecch]

Everyone is different in body alone. Try many cocktails and see how you do on them. How you feel. How your system feels. How your Viral Load is doing. How your T-Cells are doing. Keep your doctor informed as to how you feel. If you feel bad in any way stop one drug for a week and see if that helps. Do this with each drug. If you feel pretty good try lowering the dosage by taking weekend holidays. Keep an eye on your Viral Load and your T-Cells. Keep your doctor informed. I survived by doing this and yelling at my doctors because I didn’t feel well.

There may be some good advice buried in this mess. I agree that everyone should make sure a doctor is doing everything possible to address when a patient isn't feeling well.  All your cowboy behavior is pretty unwise, but it does show that you take ownership and are proactive, and that you know you are not just another number, not just another sheep in the flock. 

However, all your cowboy antics are based on "how your feel" when in fact many times health is based on the numbers, which are based on testing and probing, etc etc.  I had a friend whose dad looked and felt terrific until the day he had a massive heart attack and then needed major heart surgery, and nobody would have ever guessed his arteries were clogged, considering his vitality, thinness and robustness.

"How your feel" is only half the equation for many health challenges.  But you seem to make it 100%.

Danger.