Adherent While Healthy: My Tips for Remembering Daily HIV Meds

published on September 20, 2016 by George M. Johnson, in The Body

Take one pill a day to save your life.

This should be easy to do right? You go to the doctor. You get on treatment. You take your medicine every day. You stay healthy and thriving. For those who are HIV positive, you are working towards that goal of being undetectable. If you are on pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), you are taking the first step in staying HIV negative. But what happens when this daily, at times robotic, process of taking medication starts to become an afterthought once you begin feeling healthy? Treatment adherence can at times be a tough pill to swallow.

For many others, and me, there are definitely days that we forget to take our medication. Some days you get busy and never think about it, others you simply forget or leave your medication at home and just forgo it to not throw off your schedule. When you initially go on treatment, it is with a set goal in mind. For those who are HIV positive, that goal is to reduce the viral load to undetectable while also increasing the CD4 count and percentage. For many, this will occur within the first year of treatment. Then the doctor visits become mostly routine as you maintain an undetectable status and make sure your labs are regularly being done. You reach a place where you feel healthy, and that is when the problem starts.

You may be used to thinking of medicine as something to get off once you reach a healthy place. For instance, when you have a headache, you take a pill until the headache goes away, and then you don't take it any more. When you feel you are getting a cold, you take medicine until you feel the cold has ended.

It isn't the same with antiretrovirals and PrEP. When you reach the goal of undetectable, you can't just stop taking your medicine. You have to continue taking it for the rest of your life, even though you may feel fine. That's not an easy thing to do. When on PrEP, you are taking it as a preventive measure, so the goal is to not contract HIV from appointment to appointment, but again there is no fixed end date on taking the medication.

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Treatment as Prevention®

BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS

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Adherent While Healthy: My Tips for Remembering Daily HIV Meds

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