About AIDS

People with HIV typically take several medications – sometimes lots of medications! Ever stop to think about how one drug acts when taken alongside another drug or with certain foods?

Special precautions need to be taken when prescription meds are combined with other meds (whether prescription or over-the-counter), with some herbs (e.g., Saint-John's-wort), or even with some foods (e.g., grapefruit). Tell your doctor everything that you are taking; or better yet, prepare a written list for your doc and update it, as needed, each time you go for an appointment.

Some drug interactions can be disastrous and must be avoided at all costs. This becomes exacerbated when a patient has more than one doctor (e.g., a primary physician plus a specialist for an ad hoc problem). Dr. A may not be informed about what Dr. B is prescribing. Sometimes the drugs can both be taken, but the dosage must be adjusted up or down to accommodate their impact on each other.

Here are a few Web sites that have good information on drug interactions. Remember, however, that not every possible combination has been studied. Hardly a week goes by that we don't receive a new bulletin about drug/drug interactions, as the science of HIV disease crawls forward. If you have any reservations about what you're putting in your body, check it out with your physician.

AIDSmeds.com – Their drug-interaction calculator lets you enter your regimen and then test it against their database of restrictions.

HIVInSite.ucsf.edu (HIV/AIDS Program, University of California at San Francisco) – On the home page, click Medical, then click Drug Interactions Database.

HIV-DrugInteractions.org (HIV Pharmacology Group, University of Liverpool, UK) – The site could be more user-friendly, but it has excellent charts plus recent reports from varied conferences and publications.