The New York Times keeps publishing the cure for HIV is the cure for HIV when, in fact, such announcements are patently absurd and beneath contempt.

Cure?

I live in Appalachia.

Our HIV clinics (public health) are all deliberately located in far away places we simply can’t get to. Even if we could, the rules and regulations (for sexual abuse survivors this means forced physicals and very rough exams that get repeated over and over again) how do we manage to overcome the dark depression that descends from day one of what public health calls treatment.

Actual HIV neighborhood ghettos are being formed because the poor need to get to the clinic so often or lose coverage. This is torture, not care. After you arrive at the clinic, you can wait six hours to be seen. The clinics are filthy. I have seen mothers changing baby diapers on the floor.

I have gone to the public health pharmacy to be told they don’t have the meds and try another time. It is hopeless. They scream at you to stay in care, but how. Care is simply so often actually abuse. Public health experts wring their hands in exasperation because the suicide of people in care is so high. The high incidence of suicide makes perfect sense to me. Punishment is endemic. It is institutional and unfair. Who wants to be consistently punished.

HIV treatment is in no way a cure for anything. Personally, I don’t believe a word of it. There is always a jubilant journalism that seems desperate to point toward some mythical future. Meanwhile, most of us are stuck in public health clinics that have nothing to do with public health and a lot to do with stigma and humiliation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/podcasts/the-daily/hiv-aids-cure.html?comments#permid=31160691