I read stuff like this and I feel that you and others have this misguided attitude about the AIDS meds. That people take them daily and they have no problems with them. Everyone I know with hiv that I met through support groups and retreats have had serious problems with the meds, mostly neurological and hepatic.

I have had HIV for 7 yrs, this is why the matter is close to me and why it upsets me. I've taken the medicine as prescribed until the last year and a half, and here's what happened:

• I thought about committing suicide many times, not because of the disease but because of the treatment, I had to move from job to job pre-obamacare, because the insurance companies would change internal designations of the drugs to go from paying 90% to 40% (tiers), causing me to incur the cost of a new hyundai every year until I was forced into bankrupcy and/or forced to job hop, which harmed my future employability "why are you switching jobs so much?". This made me depressed and felt hopeless. Meds alone were 35k/yr, the blood tests about 10k yr
• The drug I was taking for 4 yrs gave horrible nightmares of being ripped apart like in hell. Others report these type of dreams; it's from the sustiva component of atripla.
  
• Atripla / Sustiva are close-subthreshold dissociative psychedelics. This means if you take anything fatty or cytochrome p450 inhibitor like grapefruit juice (or any number of things...this activity is found everywhere in food), then you absorb the medicine much faster, giving you a post-threshold dissociation, which means you lose the ability to think and behave normally--it turns you into a vegetable. This is akin to being in a mild state of k-hole from ketamine where you can accomplish nothing but strange thoughts.
• After continued use of this medicine for 3.5 yrs, I developed 'exploding head syndrome' (waking to loud sound with bright flashing lights behind the eyes) and
• Immediately after had a seizure, never before in my life. MRI revealed that this seizure destroyed a nickel sized piece of my brain hindbrain and now I have memory and neurological problems, problems dropping things that almost got me fired from my job. I know for certain this was caused by the med as there's no family or personal history, I was in decent shape and exercised / didn't do drugs and...yeah.
• The hospital didn't want to pay anything for my ER visit for the MRI seizure..They wrote 'asypmtomatic HIV related', which was a preexisting limit that caused insurance not to pay. I fought them for over a year to reclaim the $5000 bill.
• My memory and mind have improved being off all the hiv meds. I'm managing my own care now and healthier than I've been in years off the drugs. How? Research and taking a large amount of supplements, but the key is high amounts selenium, tryptophan/glutamine/cysteine, magnesium, and loads of vitamin D and b12. HIV leading to AIDS is to a large degree a nutritional disease. This is stated by NIH itself and verified in numerous studies, but you won't hear this from the pharma industry selling 60 dollar a day per person times now 0.8-1% of the US population (323M) medicine.