So today, on the chat a patient mentioned “My doctor here is scaring me from getting treated. He is tell that the treatment can be poisonous.”
5 years ago this doctor would have been correct, in fact, I used to think the same, going so far as to say “The treatment is worse than the disease”.
So what has changed?
5 years ago the mainstay of treatment was PEG Interferon injections and Ribavirin tablets. Both of these drugs have a lot of side effects and with a 1 year treatment required to deliver a 50% chance of cure it’s easy to understand why the treatment was not popular. The side effect list looked like this:
- Flu-like (headache, fatigue, fever, chills, muscle ache)
- Arthritis-like pain in back, joints
- Gastrointestinal (low appetite, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea)
- Low blood cell counts
- Depression
- Insomnia
- Hair loss
- And lots more…
All that changed in 2013 when a drug called Sovaldi® (Sofosbuvir) reached the market. This was rapidly followed by other drugs like Harvoni®, Viekira®, Zepatier®, Epclusa®, Vosevii® and Mavyret® (Maviret® in some countries). With these new drugs what we got was this:
- A typical 3 month treatment period
- Taking 1 (or a few) tablets a day
- Where there were minimal side effects (and the average patient actually felt better on treatment rather than worse)
- And where the treatment delivers a 95%+ chance of cure at the end
To tell you the truth it all sounded a bit too good to be true, but, having treated 3000 patients myself, and seen the results repeated by doctors around the world there is no doubt we have some really good solutions to curing Hepatitis C.
Getting access to these new medications can be a bit of a problem in some countries due to the cost, but affordable generics are available and they deliver the same results at a small fraction of the originator pricing. So, if you have Hep C, and would like to get back to better, do yourself a favour and look into getting treated. If you local doctor can’t help, we can help with both your prescription and getting access to the medication.
