You and your doctor should consider your T-cell count, your viral load, any symptoms you are having, and your attitude about taking HIV medications. If you take ritonavir with other antiviral drugs, you can reduce your viral load to extremely low levels, and increase your T-cell counts. This should mean staying healthier longer. Ritonavir makes the liver work more slowly. This can increase the blood levels of some drugs, including other protease inhibitors.
Some doctors combine ritonavir with other protease inhibitors to produce better blood levels.
Some mutations can keep multiplying even when you are taking an antiviral drug. When this happens, the drug will stop working. If you take a protease inhibitor by itself, resistance develops within one month. When you take more than one antiviral drug at the same time, HIV mutates much more slowly and it takes much longer for resistance to develop. Sometimes, if you develop resistance to one drug, you will also have resistance to other antiviral drugs.