Dr. Young, My age is 37 and I have been alcohol and drug free for 12 years. I have been living with HIV for 30 months. I am thinking about going on meds and looking into f\different cocktails. Any suggestions for first time med takers?

t-cells 299 (have never gone abovE 376

VIRAL LOAD 52,000 (21,000 last year) 20

Thanks for your question-- there is a lot to cover in this, and we won't really do this justice here (so check out the other postings at TheBody).

The most important thing for newbees is finding a competent HIV care provider-- information about your local options can often be had by contacting your local AIDS service organizations.

Once this is accomplished, getting a detailed physical and laboratory evaluation should help in deciding about if you should start on HIV medications-- without such information, it's tough to provide you with adequate counseling. Be sure to recognize that lab test vary from day to day, so a couple of tests over a period of time can assist with finding your true starting point. Make sure that your doctor orders resistance testing for your virus (it's part of the new testing guidelines), since if you start, you want to be as sure as possible that the medications that you start will work. There are also new treatment guidelines about which medications to start, and perhaps, which ones that should be viewed as alternative regimens.

My last comment is that medications in 2003 are much easier to take and better tolerated than in the past. My favs include efavirenz-based, and boosted-PI based treatments and my favorite nucleoside backbones are Combivir (AZT/3TC) and tenofovir/3TC.

Keep asking questions, especially of your doctor-- good luck. BY