Several years ago I had the opportunity to interview Andrew Weil, MD, about the use of Chinese medicine in the treatment of HIV disease and AIDS. While Dr. Weil acknowledged that his experience with these cases is not wide, at the same time, the protocol he feels holds the most promise for treatment is much what he would recommend for dealing with other diseases: strengthen the body’s immune system, so that it can be in a stronger position to fight illness. Because, after 40,000,000 diagnoses worldwide, 19 million deaths, (1) and not yet one cure, it seemed relevant to include Dr. Weil’s comments here for our readers. And while certainly there are other physicians whose work has been very important in this arena — doctors like Joan Priestley, M.D., and Bastyr’s Leanna Standish, ND, (2) among others — Dr. Weil’s input is interesting because of his ability to get to the philosophical heart of the matter: do we treat the disease, or do we treat the patient? What follows are his comments.

“For instance, if you look at AIDS, one of the interesting things about that disease is that there is this long period of time after infection when people are relatively healthy. It looks as if there are individuals who can go for a very long time in that period. So if we can figure out how to extend that period — if a person can have 20 or 30 years of living with the virus in their system and not be sick, that would be great. The way to achieve that is not necessarily by looking for ways to destroy the virus, but rather, through ways to increase the functioning of the immune system.

“[In the early 1990s,] if you talked about this subject [people with HIV who seem not to develop AIDS] most conventional doctors would say these cases didn’t exist. They were setting up a standard view in medicine that everybody infected with HIV was going to die. Now there have been enough of these cases for the doctors to have to admit they exist. The dominant view is that these people are infected with a benign strain of the virus; it’s putting all the cause on the virus. But in the past years, there has been serious speculation that host factors maybe involved; it’s something about the person as well as the virus. Once you admit that, you open up possibilities of doing things for people.