If you contract HIV and you take your extremely expensive prescription medications dutifully for the rest of your life you won’t die, BUT and that is a big but, if you discontinue use you’re at an elevated risk. Death sentence, no. Life sentence as a slave to whichever pharmaceutical company you’re prescribed, abso-fucking-lutely.
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It’s a California death sentence rather than a North Korean death sentence.
The world isn’t limited to the US, my dude, most people don’t have to pay exorbitant prices (or anything at all, in some countries) for those drugs.
Only if you live in a country that charges you insane prices for medication.
Extremely expensive? Well we know where op is from.
So just keep taking the meds? How does that make you a ‘slave’? If you’re living in the civilized world, health insurance or the relevant public health service will pay for them, so it doesn’t actually cost you anything in that sense either.
No shit sherlock, that’s how medication works. Replace HIV with any other illness and it’s all the same.
hiv is a death to your former way of life, or a fast ticket to your grave depending on how you handle the diagnosis. don’t know if you’ve been close with someone who has to live like this but i feel weird deciding to like it or not.
It’s not misleading propaganda. You literally agree with it in your explanation!
Yeah it’s not the best situation to be in, taking meds for the rest of your life, but it’s very different from the height of the AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s, and that’s something to be grateful for. (I’m assuming you’re young enough to not remember that, and that’s a good thing).
The goal in public health is still to get to zero new transmissions, and we have better tools to get there than in the past, like medications that substantially lower the risk of passing on the virus and prep.
Like, I don’t know who you think is being misled or how. It’s no longer a death sentence, it’s also something to still avoid, and everyone (in the mainstream, yes there are online weirdos) seems to agree on those points, including you.
Tbh mate this I s one of those takes that sounds edgy and “real” on the surface but kinda falls apart under actual scrutiny. Yeah, HIV treatment isn’t free, and yes, it’s lifelong, but so is insulin for Type 1 diabetes or dialysis or a heart transplant??? That’s not “propaganda” it’s just how chronic illness works. The real problem isn’t the meds tbh it’s the broken-ass healthcare system and pharma greed that makes people feel trapped. Blaming the science that literally turned a death sentence into a manageable condition just feels misplaced. Be mad at the system not the cure right?
Oh you gotta pay for your medication? Poor soul, must suck. But hey, with the new EO, everything will come back, right?
In some countries decent health care will absolutly grant a you pretty normal live.
Other countries highly subsidize the treatment generally. I think india pays around 2/3 of the costs for sick citizens.
But this problem is true for more than just HIV in the US. Needing insulin is not a big deal in Germany compared to the us. An epi pen in the us without insurance is like 600 $. Its not even 100$ in the Uk without incurance.
Is this some american joke im to european to understand?
Where I’m from, HIV medication is over-the-counter and quite cheap. I know how it is where you’re from.
I mean…yeah?
I’m a gay guy without HIV, but I do have to take anti-seizure meds (and have done so for the past 13 years) so that I don’t have a seizure.
If I relapse, I could die due to SUDEP, so I’m highly regular about it, even when my epilepsy meds have cost me $1000+/month thanks to living in the US.
What you are describing is literally anyone who takes any medication that is beneficial for their long-term health. Like, I work in healthcare, and you could say the same thing for literally any medication that now exists vs 100 years ago. My dad’s dad died from high blood pressure when he was 36 in the 1960s, and that’s something that you would rarely ever hear about for someone of his age dying of today thanks to meds
It’s not. I still don’t want to contract HIV.
I don’t want to take another pill on top of my bipolar medication, thank you very much.
I take daily medications for my underlying psychiatric disorder and I have never once felt like a I’ve been serving a “life sentence as a slave.” Sure my medications come with side effects, but I have always found it empowering to have agency over my illness and that I have the ability to do something to ensure I have the best quality of life.
I think I can see what your point is; that we shouldn’t be so cavalier about contracting HIV because it is still a lifelong illness that a person will have to track and monitor for the rest of their lives, but I think people are taking umbrage that you’re saying one is a slave to their diagnosis.
There are a number of reasons people can be noncompliant with their HIV medication, with cost being a major one (especially if you live in the US where the cost can range up to $2,000-$4,500 without insurance). Others can be if there is any other underlying mental illness such as depression or bipolar disorder which can make reliably having the energy to take one’s pills difficult. One person might not have a home address thus cannot have medications prescribed to them readily. There’s a myriad of reasons that a doctor has to take into consideration to ensure the best delivery and adherence to a medication schedule.
On that regard, I can seed your point that HIV is not something to treat so simply.
But to say that it is still a death sentence is in itself misleading and denies the progress we have made in making HIV a livable condition. Sure it makes life more difficult to navigate, but once someone is undetectable and thus untransmissible, their life expectancy rivals that of seronegative people.
When your government doesn’t care about you, that’ll happen.
In real countries, it’s not a death sentence.
Tell me you live in the USA without telling me you live in the USA.
Healthcare is free where I live.
Gentle reminder that the majority of the world aren’t at the behest of pharmaceutical companies.