Medical journals regarding wasting with AIDS usually have patients with liver problems associated with their disease. Oxandrolone has been found to be reasonably safe and effective for children and for people with alcohol related liver-disease. The drug is taken orally and has few significant side effects at dosages effective against severe chronic wasting. It is extremely cheap to manufacture, however its manufacturer has chosen to artificially and exploitively inflate the price of oxandrolone.
" Oxandrolone has been extensively studied in children with growth disorders and adult men with alcoholic hepatitis, an inflammation of the liver that is often accompanied by wasting. It has been shown very safe and effective for treating alcoholic hepatitis related wasting and it is believed that the metabolic problems associated with this condition are similar to those found in HIV-wasting.
Doctors' reluctance to prescribe oxandrolone, and PWA's unawareness of it, arise from a number of reasons that have nothing to do with good quality health care. One important reason is that oxandrolone is in a class of drugs known as anabolic steroids. These drugs are sometimes used by athletes to enhance strength or performance and over the past several decades have been unfairly demonized. In fact, oxandrolone at therapeutic dosages is a proven safe and effective drug for treating wasting and is not commonly associated with the dangerous side effects of other steroids, though those warnings are required to appear on the label.
Typical of many doctors was the attitude Dr. Duane Goldberg, reported in the spring 1996 issue of UC-Fresno's Inline Magazine. Dr. Goldberg prescribed oxandrolone under the brand name Anavar for a patient who had been diagnosed with AIDS for two years and had wasted from an athletic 6foot-2inch 210 pounds to 150 pounds. "To tell you the truth," Goldberg said, "I really didn't want to prescribe the Anavar as I wasn't sure what would happen. The literature I had read was brand new, only tried on a few patients back East. But I had to do something."
Goldberg's patient was a man similar to many PWA's who enter a wasting state and often give up hope and die without ever receiving effective anti-wasting treatment. "I was dying, fast. I didn't want to eat, and I was extremely weak," he reports. "Now, I'm back up to 190 pounds, and my immune system is healthy. I have no doubt that this is because of Anavar."
Unlike other anabolic steroids, such as testosterone, oxandrolone is minimally metabolized by the liver, thereby avoiding most drug interactions and the liver toxicity often seen with other steroids. Even people whose livers where badly damaged by alcohol, and therefore were unable to take many drugs, did well on oxandrolone.
Oxandrolone has been approved by the FDA since the early 1960's at a dosage of 5-10 mg per day for conditions which included weight loss "due to extensive surgery, chronic infection, severe trauma, failure to gain or maintain weight without definite pathophysiologic reasons [and] protein catabolism due to prolonged corticosteroid administration." Since HIV wasting is the result of a chronic infection and is often without definite cause, oxandrolone is clearly indicated and FDA approved for HIV-related wasting at the dose of 5-10 mg per day.
However, based upon studies in alcoholic hepatitis patients and more limited studies in people with AIDS, many researchers and activists believe that the effective dose of oxandrolone may be much higher than the FDA indicated dose, forty to eighty milligrams per day. Although the approved dose is only 10 mg per day, many physicians have prescribed higher, "off-label" doses of oxandrolone.
At the present time, insurance companies are in general covering the cost of oxandrolone, but some have reportedly balked at paying for the full effective dose because it is not "FDA approved." This, however, is something of a misuse of an FDA approval. While many insurance policies have exclusion clauses for ìexperimentalî treatments, using a drug that has been approved and shown effective for its intended purpose cannot fairly be characterized as experimental.
Like all anabolic steroids, oxandrolone is a Schedule III controlled substance, which discourages some physicians from prescribing it, especially at dosages higher than the norm. As a result, a patient may need to persuade their doctor to prescribe it."
Please Scroll Down to See Forums Below 
