Joe Stokely, June 9, 2009

On Tues, June 9, 2009 at 5:22 PM, House of Numbers wrote:
This is an enquiry e‐mail via http://www.houseofnumbers.com/
From Joe Stokely < e‐mail address confidential >

Brent,

We changed our minds about AIDS in April 2007. My wife Karri was on the "drugs" for 11 years before we found out there was another side to this. Looking back, we handed my wife's life over to a theory that had never been proven. We had no idea. I can remember praying to God to please keep her alive long enough for our kids to grow up. I can remember looking at her face and body, seeing it succumb to the disease (as we believed at that time) and thinking that she did not have much more time left to live.

I found out that people had been questioning HIV for over two decades when I accidently found the Robin Scovill documentary "The Other Side of AIDS" while searching for something on the internet. I had seen many hokey web sites on the web about AIDS but this was a video someone had posted on one of the popular video servers. I decided to see what it was all about and to give it 5 minutes then I ended staying up for close to 2 hours to watch the whole thing. The next evening I told Karri about it. This was all very interesting but could it be for real? I was not ready to believe it yet because we had spent the last 11 years believing the exact opposite! We spent hours and hours reading everything we could our hands on and our printer was constantly out of ink. We did our best to find a flaw in this new information. We could not.

Karri actually got worse for several months after she quit the drugs. I cannot tell you why she got worse but she did recover and has been healthier than she had been in a long time. As time went on after her recovery she was able to quit taking her medication for migraines and noticed that many other issues like sleeplessness, restless leg syndrome, pale drawn skin, sporadic hair loss, nausea and vomiting, and an overall wasting syndrome look all went away when she quit the drugs. At the time, her doctor told her that these were the results of having advanced HIV disease/AIDS. It never occurred to us that these were side effects of the drugs. I'm sure her healthy diet was key to her recovery and the knowledge she now had, she knew she was on the right track.

About midway through her recovery, Karri and I went to her ID doctor for a final visit. She had become very friendly with the nurse and she had contacted us because she was concerned that in Karri's current lab work, the viral load test had detected a high viral load and her t-cells were dropping. She asked Karri over the phone, "Did you quit your meds?"
During the doctor visit Karri brought some books and literature for the doctor to read so he would understand why she quit her drugs. We asked him if he had ever heard of anyone that questioned the HIV causation of AIDS? He had not and he did not even want to read any of the information we brought for him. Instead, he told Karri "You have done a very stupid thing and you will be dead very soon" Thankfully at that point we knew what we believed. That could have scared some folks to start taking the drugs again.

Thankfully I was there to be Karri's support during this difficult time; I don't know how anyone can do what we did all alone, especially when a doctor points their finger at you and tells you that you're going to die very soon. We did not take Karri's decision to quit the drugs lightly. It was my job to tell her the information I had found. Deciding what she was going to do with all this new information was up to her. We talked about it night and day. When she quit, she knew what she believed.

During the last part of her recovery an MRI result sent us in about 5 or 6 different directions with a scare of cancer. By the grace of God, the advanced medical testing procedures they use today were wrong. It was a difficult recovery period but thankfully we had developed a relationship with a local naturopathic/MD that Karri still sees today. Praise God!

My heart goes out to those that have lost loved ones to AIDS. It is so difficult for them to believe people like me because they lost a loved one and if HIV infection did not cause the death of their loved one, what did?

Thanks again Brent for challenging everyone to think differently about HIV/AIDS.

Joe Stokely