So what I like to do with my practice, is if someone starts medication, I’ll try to follow them up maybe two weeks or a month after we start. You can actually get a reduction in the viral load as quickly as two weeks after someone starts medication.
Once you get below that, we’ll start following up maybe every three to four months, and it’s really important to come in because what we call viral suppression or being undetectable, we want people to sustain that. It’s important to take your medications every day and then follow up for each visit because we want to see that that viral load is suppressed.
Dr. David Malebranche, MD, MPH, a clinician-researcher specializing in HIV, gives the lowdown on all things HIV care and treatment in the latest installment of the #AskTheHIVDoc video series.
