And even if you are Genotype 3 the odds of being cured are still pretty good, particularly if you have long enough treatment.

So the first wait is over.

There are 2 more big waits.

The wait for the 4 week PCR to provide you confidence the drugs are working and

The wait for SVR when you stop the drugs and we see if the virus is gone for good.

There’s lots of support here from people who have lived it.

This is from a year ago and how the world has changed.

How?

We have reached the point where more patients have been treated and cured with generics (over 2 million) than have been treated with Gilead product (1.3 million).

As was/is/and will remain the case for HIV, the bulk of the heavy lifting will be done by generics.

In terms of hard core scientific evidence the jury is out. More accurately I’m not sure there is even a jury, as in a decent size well controlled trial.

Anyway if it works for your husband’s pain use it.

There is no doubt it has an active ingredient (taken orally it causes diarrhoea) so given it is an oil, and with the application of heat at least a small quantity will get into your system.

As for what that might do. If you have a look at this:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19041719/

There is literature showing castor oil inhibits cytochrome P450 3A which is otherwise know as CYPD3A and the CYPD3A4 variant metabolises daclatasvir so inhibiting it with castor oil might theoretically cause higher daclatasvir levels.

That is mega speculative but possibly as good a guess as you will find.

Hi Lukemeister,

Congrats on the SVR4. The drugs should be mostly washed out of your body now. If you felt unwell taking them it’s fair to say they only just agreed with you so we would expect things to improve.

It would be worth trailing some vitamin B12 to see if that helps and checking both thyroid and for diabetes.

Welcome Mnem, best of luck with the treatment.

Other than the stigma around Hep C the technical issue is that for exposure prone procedures somebody who is PCR positive is a risk, but antibody positive and PCR negative is not a risk.

If there are no antibodies the question never comes up, so knowing that is a good idea, and if positive being armed with a negative PCR is likely to be useful.

And the first of the influential bloggers has taken it up in NZ:

https://publicaddress.net/hardnews/hep-c-when-doctors-do-the-wrong-thing/

There is quite a vibrant comments section.