Infant born HIV Positive possibly cured!

I knew a guy who got HIV from living a wild life...then he stated to pray and he said God cured him of the HIV. And when I was a Christian, he told the story at the Church I used to go to. However...I have no idea if he was telling the truth or not anymore. I don't even recall his name and it's been years since I saw him.

 

I can see how this happened, considering there are cases where the child inside the womb is treated and is born negative, even though the mother is HIV positive.

 

He dead.

 

The last time I spoke with him...I only recall the church and him had a falling out and he was back in the hospital...so yea, maybe he is dead. That was like 3 years ago.

 

True story, and I'm sure I'll get some sarcastic responses to this. My dad's cousin, Monica, contracted HIV when she was a teenager. She was a wild one back then, but had since straightened her life out and even got married. She didn't find out until much later when AIDS started developing. She was on her death bed at one point, with no hope, because I mean, it was AIDS. There was no cure for that.

One day, she woke up, was completely cured of AIDS. This may sound stupid to certain people here, but I do believe it was because of God and prayer. We never stopped believing and praying she would make it. She still had to take HIV meds for quite a long time. And now she doesn't. It was a miracle to our family.

 

This isn't to say I'm calling you a liar, just that the study of prayer might interest you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Interesting article about praying.

 

Don't worry, I don't take offense lol.

I mean, regardless of what anyone believes as far as spirituality and religion, it's something that happened in my life and happened to my family. And I would be interested to hear what non believers think as far as my dad's cousin goes and theories on the cause of her cure.

 

That would require a lot of examination and information. What were the doctor's explanation?

 

Well, if its an actual preventitive for babies that is a huge leap forward as it may be able to be launched into a full blown cure. Still amazing news if it pans out. Hope so for the kids sake.

 

I think at the time, they literally did not have a clue because she was absolutely dying. This was back in the mid-late 90's. I was around 10. I assume she did discuss this with her doctor afterward but I can't remember any specific information that my family was privy to. I just know that she did have HIV at that point and was put back on medication for that.

 

Well, then, she wasn't really cured of anything. AIDS is a syndrome, and really amounts to a symptom of HIV infection. Symptoms may come and go with any given disease. Without knowing how her symptoms (in this case, immunodeficiency) were being treated, and in the absence of many, many other details, it's impossible to provide any explanation.

All too often when people are at a loss for an explanation, they immediately jump to, "God did it," and I tend to take issue with this dichotomy on philosophical grounds. It is neither useful nor tenable (on logical grounds) as a definitive conclusion, but that doesn't make it stupid.

 

"Cured" was probably the wrong word to use. Full blown AIDS is as far as I know, rare to come back from. It's more or less a death sentence.

I should say again though, my cousin no longer has HIV.

However, I do see the point about when you don't know specifics of medication and treatments, there's no way of knowing. I thought maybe someone on here would have more medical knowledge than I do (which is close to zero LOL), and could possibly theorize.

 

I'm sure this is going to be on Family Guy

 

Well, what little I do know is that HIV evokes a massive response from the immune system, all the while infecting T-cells just as fast as your body can shoot them out. So it initially results in a massive elevated immune response.

The problem is that the cells that give rise to these specialized immune cells can only divide so many times before they essentially give out. That's when the collapse of the immune system occurs, and that's usually when you develop AIDS, and become open to attack from outside illnesses/diseases.

So a plausible scenario that I can envision is that she hadn't quite reached the stage where her immune system was completely exhausted, but still experienced a crash of her immune system that would have looked like "full blown AIDS." It is possible that this crash happened for some other reason, and wasn't the massive (and final) failure typically associated with AIDS, and that it was merely a temporary crash of her immune system from which she could recover.

But I'm not a doctor, I'm just a biologist. So I really don't know. But that seems pretty plausible to me.

 

I've read stories where people actually talked themselves out of being sick, and other stories where hypochondriacs talked themselves into being deathly sick. The mind is a powerful tool.

 

Good for the kid to have a chance to live a healthy life!

 

That was god trying to kill him.