Week of June 4, 2009, Issue #711
FRONT
Well, Well, Well: Alternatives to Pharma
Keeping natural options open
Connie Howard / health@vueweekly.com
Some victims of illness, even very serious illness, prefer gentle organic treatments over pharmaceutical ones, and defend the right to choose their medicine. Having suffered anaphylactic shock as a result of an antibiotic 30 years ago, and having watched one too many friends and relatives suffer chemotherapy and not survive, I’m passionate about defending alternatives in medicine. Which is how I met Karri Stokely.
In 1995, a week after the C-section that delivered her second child, she got very ill—infection and septic shock as a complication of surgery. A stay in the intensive care unit followed, then a long, slow convalescence at home. “In the months to follow, I never really felt like I bounced back,” she says. “I just had no energy.” Her ob-gyn was at a loss, so she went on a quest for a doctor who might be able to help. She got tested for rheumatoid arthritis, Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, mononucleosis. Everything was inconclusive, and she was prescribed Prozac.
In June of 1996, she finally saw a hematologist, who suspected liver disease, but also did an HIV test, just to cover all the bases. It came back positive. She was sent to an infectious disease specialist, who ran more blood work. T-cell count: 29; viral load: 58 000; diagnosis: AIDS. She was told she’d be lucky to have six months, to make out a will and get her affairs in order.
She reacted with the expected shock. “I could hear my husband crying, time seemed to stop, everything seemed a hundred miles away,” she told me. “It was surreal. What I couldn’t figure out was how I could possibly have contracted HIV. I was low-risk in every way, in a monogamous relationship, and had had only a few boyfriends in high school and college.”
Neither her children, nor her husband, with whom she’d always had unprotected sex, tested positive, something for which she was extremely thankful. She started immediately on an AIDS cocktail: AZT, 3TC, Crixivan and Bactrim for about five years; then AZT, 3TC and Sustiva for another six.
Within months, insomnia, painful jumpy legs, muscle cramps, hair loss, nausea, vomiting, fatigue and headaches were her constant companions. “I was 29 at the time,” she says. “Nothing really helped. I’d be at the park with the kids, and would tell my friends I was feeling pretty good, then go throw up in the bushes. The last three years on medications I started getting migraines too, a couple of times a month. They kept me in bed for days at a time, vomiting.”
With time, she began to look and feel like someone with advanced AIDS. And then, completely by accident, her husband Joe came across Robin Scovill’s film The Other Side of AIDS. He felt compelled to watch, and then do some reading. Karri was skeptical. “I told him it sounds kind of odd, but sure, I’ll look,” she remembers, “and then I got drawn in, started reading everything I could get my hands on about the topic.”
And then she went off the medications that her doctor said were her only chance at postponing death. Her T-cell counts dropped again, her viral load went up, she felt horrible, and her doctor was angry with her. “I assumed that my symptoms at that point were detox or withdrawal effects, but I had moments when I wondered if I’d done the right thing going off my medication. But my husband was very supportive, and we were convinced I’d get through somehow.”
She had found a naturopathic doctor who understood immune deficiency holistically, one who understood the immune stress introduced with the many health interventions she’d experienced—surgery, anesthetic, antibiotics, years of medications and withdrawal from medications are all known to cause immune suppression whether HIV is present or not.
Off her cocktail of medications for over two years now, and having been out running earlier that morning, she says she’s feeling great. “I haven’t had a headache since that awful time,” she tells me, sounding really, really good.
Given that AIDS medications are known to be cytotoxic and to profoundly stress the liver (medication-induced liver failure is the most common cause of death in people with treated AIDS), and given that quality of life on them for her was quickly dissolving, it sounds to me like it was a reasonable choice for her, a choice I hope we never have taken from us. V
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