why is it that physicians make proclamations about people experiencing side-effects that seem to discount the person's experience? recently someone asked about side-effects from Atripla and was told it was Sustiva. when i tried Truvada (containing Emtriva) at the behest of my physician, i developed the mother of all rashes. when i reported this to my physician i was told that this was not a side-effect. i discontinued the Truvada and the rash cleared immediately. i've taken Sustiva for more than 10 years and work with dozens of people who also take it and nary a word abour rashes. after reading that Viread was associated with bone loss i asked my physician why i was taking it in light of my osteoporosis (i am male and was 47 years old at the time). his response was to 1) tell me he had never heard of such a thing and 2) he checked the information presented by the pharmaceutical company that did not mention same and so his response was basically to ignore the situation. i guess my question is, do physicians give any credence to people's reported experience or do they just go by what is published by the pharmaceutical companies?

I would hope that most HIV specialists are not influenced by drug company literature but by published data and the experience of others. Tenofovir is known to cause rashes at a low rate but interpretation is often complicated since it is usually taken with another drug that often is even more likely to cause a rash (thus when taking three drugs at the same time and a rash develops it can be tough to attribute the rash to the correct drug). There is also a link to bone loss with tenofovir but the rate overall is low and seems to stablize for most patients after the first year or so on treatment. There may be genetic components to those side effects that are not well worked out but that could leave some patients much more susceptible to a given side effect. Your frustration is noted and understandable. KH