That was before the strange collection of illnesses had a name, and he had no way of knowing that he would devote most of the next two decades of his professional life to fighting it. By the time he saw his first Knoxville AIDS patient three years later, he was starting to understand the magnitude of what he was up against. He has ridden the emotional roller coaster with his patients as they hear about new miracle drugs that are tested, made available, and sometimes debunked or found to be mixed blessings. People who were not infected with HIV are becoming infected with a potentially and probably fatal disease. Although he has seen good results from AIDS drugs like the protease inhibitors, he cautions against excess optimism.
Protease inhibitors unmask diabetes in some patients.
Also, they are not particularly good drugs because virus can rapidly develop resistance. In some patients, the virus breaks through anyway, and again the analogy with chemotherapy applies. You take deadly drugs, get a remission and enjoy it, because the disease will be back. That's proven to be hard to take. The real fear is that we will see complications following fast-track approval.