Without effective immune control, persons infected with HIV are faced with lifelong therapy. Medical research as a result is engaged in a constant race to keep ahead of the virus. New drugs are required and old ones dropped each time HIV develops resistance or long-term side effects become intolerable. When there are no new agents to prescribe its as if the clock were turned back to 1995. In those days, adventurous patients were beginning to stop therapy after a year or so with the idea that they might finally be free of the HIV nightmare.
Holistic health is overrated, too.
That makes sense because these two support the body's overall metabolic activities, which are sorely taxed by chronic HIV infection. Unless the immune system is finely tuned to suppress the virus, a vigorous immune defense ironically helps HIV by providing more activated cells in which it can massively multiply. By chance, a few people do succeed in curbing HIV on their own. Conventional wisdom would consider this immune defense ineffective because it leaves open to many opportunities for HIV to mutate and evade detection. The key to success here seems to lie in a genetic ability to flag HIV-infected cells in a particularly efficient manner.