Met Rocio at University.
In the end of the day you want your patient to say ‘’I feel better’’, that’s what matters
What exactly were your initial studies?
– I am a complicated individual, I am a practitioner, a health care clinical practitioner, and I specialize in rehabilitation sciences in my undergraduate work, so I became registered as a bio kinetisist, which is really unique to South Africa. It is a really satisfying career in the idea of trying to improve someone’s health and well being, but I wanted a little more, I wanted to be able to reach more people not to just have one to one session with the patient, so I got into more research.
– I did a Master in sports medicine and rehabilitation and then decided I would like to do something more different. I basically work with exercise immunology and physiology so it is laboratory based but I am trying to kind of breach the gap between interacting with the patient, getting the samples and working it within the lab
What samples?
– Blood, saliva, sweat. So, it is like working with the patient, maybe prescribe a specific intervention or supplement or depending what the study is. My study is with HIV infected individuals.
– What we realized is that now that this disease, which was an epidemic and the world was in fear of this, with the creation of all these new medicines, people are living longer, is now a more chronic disease.
Than a disease someone dies from?
– Yes, so it is now more similar to cholesterol or diabetes
How did it come to be a chronic disease?
– HIV enters the body and attacks your immune system thus the cells which are there to protect you from an opportunistic infection like flu, right? So your body doesn’t have these memory cells to be able to work towards this flu virus that has entered, so your body is now susceptible, and a person with HIV can die from a simple disease. The medication that has been developed, has allowed the body be somehow in this grey area were the HIV is still there, but the medication is trying to boost their immune system.
– So, you have the disease, you always have the disease, because there is no cure, but the medication allows to still live a longer life. You still have the side effects which still makes it a chronic disease.
What are the side effects?
– Some of the side effects are chronic diseases themselves like increasing cardiovascular disease, cardiac disease, high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol etc
– My idea for the project, when I was discussing it with my supervisor, was that is really easy to pop another medical intervention there and give them one more tablet, or tell them to visit some clinician for some treatment, but how can you make it sustainable? What can we advise them, even if it is something simple to improve their quality of life?
– So the intervention was to give them a nutrition supplement, and ultimately this supplement is related to something like milk, which is biochemically construct of the cheese making process, so is like a protein we gave them as also a placebo as also exercise intervention specific to the individual, but people did not know which they were taking. It was an experiment. With the exercise they improve their muscle mass, because this is one of the side effects, to lose mass.*
– At the end of the day, depending on the results we just need to tell our patients to drink a little bit more milk. It is affordable, it’s important and possibly we can subscribe some short of activity for them.
– There is a term we use in Africa called ‘’the generation of the grandmother’’ because most of the children will be raised by their grandmothers, there is a mother generation that is almost depleted due to the HIV virus.
Fact: Studentgård
Studentgård is a photo project by photographer Kalandranis Dimitris. The project covers life stories of the Lund University Students.
