Quote Originally Posted by stack_it View Post
Where the hell you been vp? I almost bumped you're ask a black man thread the other day just to see if you were still around.





To the op. If she has herpes why would this even be a question to ponder. If it's just the oral form of herpes (cold sores) then there not all that bad. I get them from time to time. Just don't let her go down on you when she has a cold sore.
Partially true. In rare cases the virus gets confused when running down the nerve to your lip, and can sometimes mistakenly travel down the optic nerve, then you are in REAL trouble and pain.

Tea tree oil, olive oil, whatever oils, are all home remedies with undocumented efficacy. If those things attenuated the symptoms of the virus to the degree that they claim, some pharmaceutical company or other would have developed it further whether it was patentable or not and it would be well known among doctors and the people suffering from the illness.

It's important to understand there is absolutely no cure for the virus. Once you have it, it is a life sentence. All that drugs like Valtrex do, is help your body to suppress the outbreaks and keep the virus in a "dormant" state. There is a divide among health care practitioners on whether or not to treat with anti-virals. One side of the argument, is that you should not tx a patient with anti-virals and allow their immune system to learn the virus and mount a response. Some clinical evidence shows that after about 5 years the body is able to suppress most outbreaks and after about 10 years sufferers of the virus rarely experience any outbreaks barring a severe life event which is very stressful and causes a huge upsurge of cortisol. The other side of the argument, of course, is that outbreaks should be suppressed with anti-viral drugs such as Valtrex because it improves the quality of life of a patient and reduces their ability to transmit the virus to a third party. There's a very good argument to be made there, as reducing the risk of transmission is very important. The problem with the virus and the issue of skin-to-skin contact is that even using prophylactics like condoms will not eliminate the risk of transmission if the virus is sloughing on areas of skin not covered or protected by the condom.

Being that there is no cure for virus's, the only real cure is to let the virus run through its life cycle. The amount of time that HSV survives in the body is really unknown, but the point of treatment is to suppress the virus so that the infected person can have a better quality of life. The same reasoning is used with treatment of HIV/AIDS patients, the prevailing ideology is to keep the patient alive long enough for the virus to eventually run its course and die on its own. Of course, no one knows how long the HIV life cycle is, but it is possibly the reason that people who have been treated for 20+ years experience undetectable viral loads and "appear" to be cured. Some will have undetectable viral loads indefinitely, and it is thought that the virus has run its course completely. We don't really know at this point. Virus's are very interesting organisms.