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Oct. 4, 2024 - Dr. Oz Podcast
41:52
Charlie Sheen Opens Up About His Health & Addictions | Dr. Oz | S7 | Ep 94 | Full Episode
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Time Text
Charlie Sheen.
I'm amazed that I'm actually alive.
Dr. Oz.
Were you scared that Charlie Sheen was gonna die from AIDS? The experimental treatment.
I've been off my meds for about a week now.
And yeah, I'm a risk of my life, sure.
A sight of Charlie never before seen.
I got a demon on board that's trying to kill me.
And the bombshell he never saw coming.
I apologize, I'm a little off my game because right before I walked out here, I got some results.
Imagine holding on to a life-changing health secret for four years and then finally opening up.
That's what happened with Charlie Sheen.
The day he announced to the world he was HIV positive.
Now, Charlie saw it as putting an end to the latest rumors swirling around his often controversial life.
But I saw it as a landmark day for HIV and AIDS. A disease still very much feared, but also still very much under the radar.
Like it or not, Charlie Sheen is shining a new light on HIV. Not just by living and coping with the disease, but by making it his mission to chase a cure.
But today, he is here for his first one-on-one interview since he made the announcement that changed his life.
When I visited Charlie later at his home, in the time since he made that fateful announcement, Charlie stopped drinking and started soul-searching, anchored by the memory of a very profound dream, which proved to be a premonition.
My face was bloated, my eyes were pinched, I was sweating, and I had a sign around my neck.
What did it say?
It said, AIDS. AIDS. How's it different now that you've been public about this big burden of HIV? It's an incredible weight that's been lifted.
I only wish I'd done it sooner.
Charlie Sheen is here.
Come on out, Charlie.
Thank you.
Wow.
This is a lovely welcoming here.
I'm glad you're here.
I'm thrilled to be here.
Thank you.
So you told me when I was visiting at your house that being honest about your HIV status, being honest about it to the entire world, has made your life easier.
How is that?
It's made it a lot easier in that I'm not sitting hiding, protecting, imprisoned by this deep, dark secret.
It was like these shackles had been removed and there was a sense of true freedom.
And that led to, very shortly afterwards, the next day, the decision to honor my promise to myself and to the countless others suffering from this, to really take the reins and do something about this, do something that really matters.
Thank you.
Three years ago, you were on our show.
Yeah.
We talked about your health.
Sure.
You didn't feel you could be honest about your HIV status.
No.
For those four years that you kept it a secret.
Yeah.
Why did you feel compelled to do that?
To not be public about your HIV status.
I thought it would have professional implications.
I thought there would be potentially a lot of legal entanglement.
Well, that happened anyway.
The one thing I have to say is, as anybody that's claiming anything, The absolute period, the end, bottom line is that nobody is infected, and I told everybody.
So that's on the record.
So when you first heard the doctor utter the phrase, you have the HIV infection.
And I remember the story you told as we ran about having that dream at age 28. Sure.
The big placard saying AIDS on it.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was, wow.
And so you had that premonition, but it's really different when someone actually tells you you have the virus.
It is, unless you've lived inside that moment, it's not one that you can really put words on or just, I can tell you, I don't remember it completely.
It's, your first thought, they got it wrong.
It can't be me.
It's a It's a tough moment.
I don't wish on anybody.
And if I can, you know, through, you know, my travels, wherever this odyssey takes me or guides me, if I can prevent others from having to live inside that moment, then that's what I'm gonna frickin' do, Were you scared when you heard the diagnosis?
Were you scared that Charlie Sheen was going to die from AIDS? Yeah, a little bit.
It wasn't so much fear of death in that moment.
It was...
You have to...
I had to get through a whole...
All the internal dialogue that deals with...
You know, from why me to woe is me to...
Again, it's a process.
Do you think the drugs and the sex addiction contributed to your becoming HIV positive?
Yeah, I would say most certainly.
Most certainly.
Do you have any idea how you contracted HIV? You know, I think everyone, most people that have it, have a hard time with that question.
Correct?
Yeah, I really wish I knew.
I have ideas about possible But it's hard to sit here and answer, honestly.
Yeah.
Well, how are you doing now?
Do you feel okay on these medications?
Well, you know, I... Yeah, no, it was going well for all that time.
And then I started hearing about some alternative stuff.
Because when I came out, when I went public, it...
A lot of people came forward with a lot of treatments and cures or claims of such.
And so if what was being professed, if any part of it was true, then I thought it was worth exploring.
If something else is out there, I'm going to find it.
I apologize.
I'm a little off my game because right before I walked out here, I got some results that I wasn't...
I was disappointed about.
And I know this is an experiment that I took a stroll down a different path.
But yeah, I had been non-detectable and non-detectable and checking the blood every week and then found out that the numbers were back up.
It seems like there's a mantra, you know, to stay on your meds, stay on your meds, stay on your meds.
And Michelle looked at me and said, well, you look very healthy, you look very present, very clear.
I told her, I said, well, I'm not on my meds.
Today, Charlie Sheen opens up about living with HIV.
All right, so we agreed, we embarked on this journey to chase the cure, that we'd be brutally honest.
Sure.
With everybody.
So I'm going to ask questions that are sometimes tough, but I want you to be able to answer them.
Some folks watching right now are going to say, Charlie Sheen is just manipulating us.
He's just doing this because he wants to change his reputation.
What do you say to those critics who say, this is just about improving your public image?
I mean, they're really entitled to believe whatever they want.
It's really none of my business or any of my concern.
You know, I know in my heart what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, so I don't really give any...
I can't really even be concerned about that, you know?
You told me the day you announced publicly that you should be positive, that you do not want to be the face Of HIV and AIDS. Right.
And yet you've agreed to take on this illness in a very public way.
It'll end up resulting in you being the face of this illness for some people.
I mean, I'm okay with that.
Somebody has to be.
Around the time of your decision to make the announcement, we spoke a bit about the opportunity and obligation that you have.
And you sent me a poem.
It's really a story, but it's very poetic.
And it was your vision of what you might want to do with your life.
It's a passion you have, and I would appreciate if you could read this.
There's just a short part of it to the audience.
Oh, yeah.
And it sounds sort of like the treatment for a movie, in fairness, but then you are in that field.
Sure.
Is this the first page, though?
No, I abstracted it because I didn't want to take all your time.
You didn't like what I did with his writing.
This is the artist's mind.
I got edited.
This is from an idea I had for a show at some point.
And after setting up the premise, I spoke about that we'll go through the medical front lines, the alternative back rooms, and at times the radically unsafe and uncharted catacombs and warrens that have been labeled or deemed as godless voodoo or unapproved junk science.
Show's called, would be called Chasing the Cure.
Chasing the Cure will forever reweave the fabric of our essential belief system that we've been condemned to accept as the truth.
The worm will turn, the trade winds will shift.
The worm will turn, the trade winds shift.
Yeah.
So what is Chasing the Cure?
Explain that to everybody.
I, again, partially came out of a dream that I saw myself, you want me to sign this for you?
Sorry.
Yes.
We will sign this.
It'll be on eBay soon.
I saw myself doing this show that was a hybrid reality, documentary style, following me through what I basically just described, through the conventional field and the not so conventional approach.
So Charlie allowed our cameras to follow him to his doctor's appointments, and he had quite a few.
And these are the first steps on his journey to chase the cure.
Oh, look at that.
Charlie Sheen spends his days working out, eating right, and chasing the cure.
Hi, Dad.
Good morning, Mr. Sheen.
Good to see you.
Tests and doctors play a big role.
Right now we're heading to see Dr. Robert Huizenga.
He's been my doctor for years.
So, still on your medication?
Yeah.
Okay, taking them every day?
Pretty much, yeah.
We're going to do a blood test that's looking for the smallest amount of the viral RNA. And if we can't detect it, we know we're doing our job.
The retroviral cocktail you've been on has just been amazing.
It's been amazing.
Well, it's been amazing for that, for the number.
I don't know how amazing it's been for me, you know?
Charlie's next destination, the Scripps Research Institute, one of the world's top biomedical research facilities.
Ground zero in the search for an HIV vaccine.
This is Andrew Ward.
Andrew, this is her.
Hey Andrew, how are you?
Pleasure to meet you.
It's a pleasure.
Is there a vaccine on the horizon that you foresee or that could come out of the research that's actually done here?
Yeah, in fact, We think this is one component of a potential vaccine.
Can I borrow that?
The problem with HIV and why it's so difficult to cure is it takes its DNA and puts it into your genome.
So it hides in your own genome.
So even if you can knock down the virus, which we have, modern medicine does a good job of that.
If you stop taking the modern medicine, the HIV says, oh great, there's nothing stopping me.
I'm going to start making more copies of myself and you get a relapse.
Got it.
Charlie's chase for the cure continued.
Next stop, renowned integrative HIV specialist, Dr. Miles Spahr.
All right, I want you to have a seat.
The point of what I do is to say definitely take these medicines.
They're working.
From what I understand, you're undetectable, you're viral loads.
I am, yeah.
Which is great, but there's also a lot you can do to help make sure your health is optimal.
And that's where integrative medicine comes in.
Dr. Spahr tackles diet and lifestyle changes.
Then, Charlie's addictions.
So you're smoking.
Yeah, I'm smoking.
How much are you smoking?
About a pack and a half.
So one thing I'll recommend is acupuncture.
Okay.
That will help with all the things we've talked about, with the immune system, with inflammation, but also specifically with helping to quit smoking.
Yeah.
I want to introduce you to Michelle Ching, our acupuncturist.
Hi Michelle, I'm Charlie.
Hi, nice to meet you.
To supplement Charlie's conventional western medications, Dr. Spahr suggests a widely used therapy from eastern medicine.
Take your thumb and you'll stimulate the point.
Okay.
The point's here throughout the week.
Michelle Ching is a nationally certified practitioner of oriental medicine and licensed acupuncturist.
Well that was interesting.
It seems like there's a mantra.
You know, just stay on your meds, stay on your meds, stay on your meds.
Then, the bombshells.
As I was leaving, you know, Michelle looked at me and said, well, you look very healthy, you look very present, very clear.
And I told her, I said, well, I'm not on my meds.
You know, I've been off my meds for about a week now.
And I always feel great.
And yeah, am I risking my life?
Sure.
So what?
I was born dead, you know.
So that part of it doesn't faze me at all.
You know, it's the reason I told my mom on day one that the disease picked the wrong guy if it wanted to stay alive.
I was surprised when I heard that.
We had spoken at your home.
You said you could count on one hand the number of days you may have missed taking your HIV meds.
Sure.
Are you still off them?
I am.
When we come back, why Charlie went off his HIV meds?
And Charlie traveled to Mexico searching for an experimental treatment from a doctor I never heard of.
We did see some incredible results.
Didn't strike you as bizarre that he was putting his life at risk too?
Today, Charlie Sheen opens up about living with HIV. All right, so let me show you a little chart that Dr. Hizenga and I made in preparation for this show.
Sure.
He's been following your blood levels of HIV. This is the viral load.
And with your permission, we're going to share this with everybody.
Please, by all means.
So back on July the 19th, 2011, you were diagnosed.
You had 4.4 million of these particles that they identified.
Kind of a lot.
A lot.
Yeah.
It's a lot.
And within six months, as you see from this chart, it's back to normal.
It's undetectable.
And I'm going to point something out for everybody, but Charlie, especially for you.
It stayed undetectable in those three and a half years since you got it under control.
So why would you take a risk of not taking a cocktail That seems to really be working well for you.
Well, actually, I didn't see it as Russian roulette.
I didn't see it as a complete dismissal of the conventional course that we've been on.
But this, you know, I'm not recommending that anybody else do this.
I'm presenting myself, I guess, as some kind of a guinea pig.
All right, so Charlie traveled to Mexico searching for an experimental treatment from a doctor I've never heard of until Charlie told me about him.
His name is Dr. Sam Tachoa, and he claims to know how to cure HIV and AIDS. I wondered why neither my team nor I had ever heard about this therapy.
Or Dr. Chachoa himself.
It's not easy to get in touch with him, but I did finally speak on the phone with Dr. Chachoa about Charlie's HIV status.
He's the first adult in his youth to go into the meeting.
The conventional medicine has never done that.
He was still HIV positive five years after he started his antivirals.
And PCR zero, his count went back down to zero just taking...
Dr. Chachoa is not licensed to practice in the U.S. He resides and practices in Mexico, where Charlie Sheen recently visited him in his chase for the cure.
So you went to Mexico?
I did.
To visit with Dr. Chachoa?
I did, yeah.
What's the treatment?
What's being done?
It was a series of injections and then blood work.
And again, we did see some incredible results early on.
Explain what you saw that was encouraging.
That off of the med cocktail, that I was undetectable.
HIV titers were not detectable.
Yeah.
And it stayed that way.
I did an experiment that I didn't have any faith in, but I went along with it.
Two dear friends that you know, they withdrew their blood.
I withdrew some of mine, and I added mine to their test tubes.
The blood was then incubated, cultured for four days, and when the results came back, all three were undetectable.
So I actually sat and observed this stuff.
That actually happened.
And if you'd seen something like that, wouldn't you have thought, okay, there might be something here?
Well, he is supremely confident.
I asked as many questions as I could.
We're still, I'm still trying to understand what he's doing.
Right.
I've done a lot of homework on this.
He mentioned some patents.
I went and I pulled these patents.
They're 20 years old.
They're not his patents, but he said that they were published papers.
And I got to say, except for a little newsletter of Bolton, I only found one published paper.
I'm always a little nervous when I see that long gap of time when people have been researching this and haven't gotten anywhere.
Actually, we spoke to someone at the NIH and said that they couldn't find benefit.
So that was the first major concern that I had.
But then something else happened that really concerned me.
So when we spoke with him on the phone, he said something that startled me.
Something that I never thought I'd hear out of the mouth of a doctor.
So, take a listen.
It's pretty inappropriate.
Inappropriate and completely mind-blowing.
I watched that happen and he felt so confident of what he delivered that my blood would not be any risk to him.
So what did he do?
Specifically, put a needle in you.
Yeah, I had a lump on my elbow that I had drained about a week prior to that, and it was still a little bit, but it was still there, so he pulled some out of that, and he stuck it in the top of his forearm.
I mean, this stuff happened.
So again, you can see why I was developing more faith and more interest and intrigue into this The path this gentleman was potentially taking me down.
Didn't it strike you as bizarre that he was putting his life at risk, too?
Yeah, it was radically bizarre.
But I look at my own life in relation to that, and I just figured, okay, it's just another Wednesday, you know?
So, and you know, I'm not making a case for any of this, or I'm not debating, I'm I'm not defending it.
This is not my world.
But I'm just sharing the experiences that I witnessed.
So let me introduce everyone to Dr. Zenga, this Charlie's doctor and a trusted resource.
So, you know, I'm just going to have this open conversation.
Dr. Zenga, you were here two months ago.
At the time, we were speaking about how seriously Charlie takes his health and where the lapses have been.
What have you been telling your patient about his not taking the meds for the last month?
Charlie knows that he has been incredibly successful with this antiretroviral cocktail.
It's incredibly helped him.
It's basically put you in a position to live an entirely normal life, normal life expectancy, normal quality of life.
And it would just break my heart if you did anything where you threw that opportunity, threw that incredible advance against this horrible disease away and went back to where we were several decades ago where this disease was a killer.
And it would just break my heart if you did anything to risk returning to that horrible part of our history.
Message received.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I think you ought to be on your meds.
Your doctors believe that.
What would it do?
What would it require for you to go back on your medications?
I'm going to take them on the flight home.
What am I, an idiot?
Let's take a break.
We'll be right back.
Let's talk a little bit about the liver.
Okay.
But we don't believe my liver has ever looked like this, do we?
It's not where you are now.
Got it.
This is Christmas future.
If you went back and started drinking again.
We're back with Charles.
So there's no secret that your life has been filled with great success as an actor.
Thank you.
Many of your fans are watching at home and in the studio.
Oh, thank you.
But you've also been fodder for tabloids because of your history of addictions to sex and to drugs and to gambling.
So, how about the effect on your marriage of addiction?
Did it hurt the marriages?
It didn't help.
It didn't help.
I don't know that I'm cut out for marriage to begin with.
I'm over three.
I'm just not good at it.
So yeah, I would say that that certainly played a part.
How much money do you think you lost because of your gambling addiction?
Wow.
How's your math?
It was a lot.
It was a lot.
It was in the millions.
Yeah, but it was just sports.
I'd just been on sports because I wanted to lose money over a three-hour period, not just a roll of the dice or a cut of the deck.
But gambling is just like drugs because, you know, you call a bookie, you make a bet.
It's like calling a dealer.
I had an episode of...
Sorry.
Shoot.
I had an episode June 9th, and that very night, I'd had a wonderful dinner with my mom, Janet, and I was walking up the stairs, and I said, okay, I can either take half a Lunesta, the prescribed sleeping pill, and go to sleep and end this great evening properly,
or I can hit the pipe and go to the ER. And I shook hands with the universe that night, and I said, we're done.
Nothing since that night.
No drugs since June 9, 2015. Yeah, that actual night.
If you finished your dinner with your mom, and you could have taken half a sleeping pill or take a hit with the cocaine and end up in the ER, it seems like it was actually a cry for help.
Someone look at me.
I'm not in a good spot.
Someone pay attention to me.
Someone intervene on me.
Okay, we could follow it back to that.
Yeah, I didn't see it as such in the moment.
You know?
So let me, if I can, since you talked about stopping things.
Sure.
I got your labs, again, with your permission.
Right.
Dr. Zenga's help.
I just looked at your liver function.
Of course, your liver...
Toxify you not just from drugs, but from alcohol sure so these are your liver functions over the last year Look at this little graph there.
You notice this low low anything.
Let's say less than 200.
It's not crisis right right notice what happened in July the 13th a Huge spike yeah of this year that was Mexico That was Mexico that was a vacation in Mexico That actual month yeah So what happened that would torture your liver like that?
That's a lot of damage to your liver.
Drinking my face off.
Drinking my face off.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah, that was one of the last great runs.
It's a lot of alcohol to get your liver functions into that state.
What's the next number on the graph?
You put the graph back up for Dr. Sheen, please, for Dr. Sheen's benefit.
So what happened after that?
After that, you came back to normal.
How long have you been sober for?
Since the day after I did Matt Lauer, because I made that decision on the plane going home from that interview.
That's when that happened.
And you've gotten sober in the past.
What's different this time?
I'm different.
I'm different.
You know, doing this alone is hard. - Yeah.
I've watched addiction, destroyed patients of mine, guests on the show, members of the audience.
There are lots of consequences of what we do in our lives.
So I wanted to share a surgeon's eye view of how I see the body because I thought it might help you.
And this is something that I think you all benefit from.
This is, I think, a way of looking at the ravages of addiction.
So we took a little trip to the Jersey City Medical Center in New Jersey, very close to my home.
Right.
Take a look.
This is the morgue.
Thinking about a morgue, you should learn a lot of things by seeing what went wrong.
That's how we learn from our mistakes that make it better.
When people die, we take out their organs, in part because we learn so much about the mistakes they made.
Okay.
But sometimes people die who are pretty healthy, and so I actually have someone like that, so I can show you what normal is.
Look at this.
Hmm.
Wow.
This is fascinating.
The lungs, these are two normal lungs.
Okay.
And when you smoke and get pneumonia, it lives like that.
So compare these two.
Yikes.
This is pretty hideous.
Wow.
Does it feel boggy to you, this one?
Yeah, it's about three times the weight.
So, let's move on.
Let's talk a little bit about the liver.
Okay.
Its organ is precious.
It's the largest organ.
And if you hold the liver up and compare it to this...
Jesus.
Is that cirrhotic?
It's cirrhotic.
You can see why they called it that.
You see how it looks like the little rocks in here?
Cirrhosis means it's like a rock, a pair of them.
Again, the weight is totally different.
The surface texture is ridiculously different.
The thing about the liver, though, is this is our body's weight control system.
It's the one that clears out toxins.
It's a big filter, yeah.
So, there are times, I look at your laboratory tests, when the function of your liver has been elevated, demonstrating that you're actually going from this Because of inflammation and irritation and living death of some cells towards this.
Right.
But we don't believe my liver's ever looked like this, do we?
It's not where you are now.
Got it.
This is Christmas future.
If you went back and started drinking again, I can put it back here.
Now let's shift gears a little bit to my specialty.
Okay.
The heart.
The organ itself is remarkable because it's like a python, coiled in the chest.
Wow.
When people have heart attacks, it grows dramatically.
And cigarettes are a big cause of that.
Drugs, especially cocaine.
Sure.
Big cause of that.
Alcohol.
What did my dad just go through?
He had a quad bypass.
So they took veins from his leg and they took a chest wall artery.
And what they realized when they studied him, they realized that these little arteries here, these little tiny, almost feathery vessels there, that vessel was blocked.
This is called the Widowmaker.
This little itty bitty thing, the size of a capellini, is the artery that brings life nurturing blood to the heart muscle.
The two that connects the heart, the rest of the body, is called the aorta.
And it looks like this.
So go ahead and feel that.
Okay.
Now, what ends up happening when you have hardening of the arteries like your dad had is that tube turns to this.
There's really no comparison.
And this is like a steel pipe that got rusted.
Yeah.
This is like a nice Teflon hose.
Um, reversible?
This doesn't go back to normal.
Got it.
But it doesn't have to go back to normal.
It just has to not get worse.
Got it.
And this man probably didn't think he'd be here right now.
This man didn't think he'd be here right now.
So now that you've had a chance to process the little autopsy visit, what struck you the most?
What struck me the most was lungs and liver.
Yeah it's, I haven't quite processed that that's where I could be heading even though I was holding it in my hands in its worst possible state.
But it's educational.
It's deeply impacting.
Do you think your dad's near-death experience all those years ago, when you were so young, influenced some of the life choices you've made?
Sometimes it seems to me that you put yourself at risk.
Sure.
Yeah, I was born dead.
You have your father's dog tag from Apocalypse Now.
Right.
And you have the back fin of Jaws.
Yeah.
Why do you store those?
Well, they're my two favorite films ever made.
And if you think about Jaws, it's It's a monster that you seemingly cannot kill, which is what I've got.
But they finally killed it through teamwork.
And with Apocalypse, it is one man's journey into the unknown, into himself, into the darkness.
And so when you put those two together, now that display makes perfect sense for the next phase I'm embarking on.
So you've described your journey.
Jason, the cure for HIV and AIDS in a way that's sort of similar to your dad's journey in Apocalypse Now.
Yeah.
Has your diagnosis of HIV brought you closer to him?
Absolutely it has, yeah.
Something happened with he and I. We're such better friends these days than we've ever been.
We don't agree on everything, obviously.
I mean, what son and father do?
But it's, no, he's a special cat.
And I'm really lucky to have him, you know.
Thank you.
There was a story about you being called back To visit with your father when he was filming Apocalypse Now.
He'd suffered a heart attack.
Yeah.
He was 36, I think?
He was, yeah.
Yeah, I was 10. So at age 10, you're watching your father in a foreign country, fighting for his life.
Yeah.
Did you have a fear that he would die at the time?
Did it influence how you think about death?
I saw him...
When I'd last seen him prior to the trip back to the Philippines, he was vibrant and young and in shape and handsome.
He looked like a movie star, you know?
And when I saw him again, he was on a cane.
He was on a cane and he just, he didn't, it wasn't my dad, you know?
Do you think your dad's near-death experience all those years ago, when you were so young, influenced some of the life choices you've made?
Did it, uh...
Sometimes it seems to me that you put yourself at risk.
Are you challenging death?
Yeah, I think I was for a while there.
Sure.
Yeah, I was born dead.
Seriously, I was born dead.
What do you mean you're born dead?
Well, I couldn't.
I wasn't breathing.
The umbilical cord was taller.
I was completely blue.
There was no heart rate.
There was no brain.
There was nothing.
And my dad was in the room and he said, let's call a priest.
And the doctor, this gentleman named Erwin Shabon, that's why my middle name is Erwin.
I would have preferred Shabon.
That's much cooler.
He started beating me and beating me.
He told my dad, he said, you do your job and I'll do mine.
And he brought me back to life.
So knowing that, I think I might have played into that a little too much at times.
Just for those couple decades.
I'm amazed that I'm actually alive.
But I do beat myself up from time to time about why it took me so long.
To really start being responsible, knowing I got a demon on board that's trying to kill me, you know?
I can't change any of that.
I can't go back.
I can only learn from it.
But there's a lot of, what was I thinking?
Well, I guess I wasn't, you know?
What we've learned is that when people go off their medicines, it's not just the viral load that goes up, but the amount of inflammation.
- That's very, very apropos to Charlie, because your inflammation levels went up 100 fold over the last several weeks. - We're back with Charlie Sheen.
So what I do think is important is finding a cure.
The chase for the cure that was your passion, your vision.
So I've asked Dr. Michelle Cespedes.
I've said it wrong every time possible.
But Dr. Cespedes is a world-renowned infectious disease specialist from Mount Sinai Hospital here in New York.
So Dr. Cespedes...
Help me, Charlie, and everyone else understand.
If you're chasing the cure, how will you know if you have it for HIV? So it's interesting.
So to build upon some of the research that Dr. Ward from the Scripps Institute mentioned, HIV has a part of it when it's making copies that go on to infect new cells, that it actually inserts some of its information into our cells, into our DNA. When you're taking HIV medicines, we suppress more babies or more copies being made to go on to infect.
But these cells feel that pressure and kind of essentially go into a foxhole, go into a resting state and sleep until that pressure is gone.
The definition of a cure would be even if I stopped taking medicines, these cells that kind of had hidden HIV DNA in them either are all awoken and we kind of get rid of the pool or the reservoir of these resting cells or we find a way to actually put them in a permanent vegetative state so they never wake up and then the potential for actually ongoing infection or to ever have a viral load again is gone.
That's the goal.
That's the target.
That's the goal.
So the risk of going on and off medicines, what we've seen consistently over the years, is that the virus now has more chances to figure out how the medicines work and to outsmart it and, what we say, develop resistance.
The other thing is when someone becomes detectable in the amount of virus that they have in their system again, They can transmit to others.
And now what we've learned is that when people go off their medicines, it's not just the viral load that goes up, but the amount of inflammation, your body's response to recognizing that there's something there that shouldn't be there.
So now some of the biggest killers of people who do have HIV are not these old opportunistic infections that we've spoken about or these infections that really got you when your immune system was weak.
We know we can keep your immune system strong, or there are other ways, but what we're seeing is that people are having reactions related to this rise of inflammation, and now what we see in this day and age, the more likely things to kill our patients with HIV are actually Cardiovascular disease, liver and kidney problems related to your body's response to having virus around again.
It's interesting that, you know, your father has, you have a family history of cardiovascular disease.
Let me just add, that's very, very Apropos to Charlie because your inflammation levels went up a hundred fold over the last several weeks and with your family history of the heart disease this is exactly what we talked about in terms of inflammation aging you prematurely and hastening these you know old age diseases and making them happen 10, 20 plus years earlier than they otherwise would have.
Absolutely.
This has been very difficult for you, I know.
Sure.
You're brave.
Thank you.
And I want to keep sharing your journey with the entire world.
And as long as you're willing to continue to be brutally honest, warts and all, about your journey, we will do this together.
Deal?
Thank you very much.
All right, so you committed to getting your blood drawn on the stage with a couple hundred witnesses on your chasing of the cure.
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
Come on back.
Maybe something about the mania is pushing you to the addictions that are much more dangerous for you than the HIV.
So we're going to run these studies.
You need multiple dots to connect to decide if something's working or not.
Sure.
And we'll share your insights together with anyone else who's involved in your care as you desire.
Excellent.
We're all done.
It's easy to judge Charlie Sheen from the outside looking in.
And rightly or wrongly, a lot of us have.
But the truth is, we all have inner demons.
Charlie's are just more extreme, more public.
We can all learn something by watching him wrestle them.
And Charlie says he's chasing the cure for HIV. But I hope he also chases the cure for the demons within.
They pose as much as a threat to his health, if not more, than HIV. So I hope as I continue on this journey with Charlie, you'll continue with us.
Because together, we can all learn something about chasing the cure.
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