Treatment with anti-HIV drugs is sometimes called combination therapy, because people usually take at least three different drugs at the same time.
This is also known as antiretroviral therapy, or highly active antiretroviral therapy - HAART for short.
HIV treatment does not cure HIV, but it stops the virus reproducing in your body. It can reduce levels of the virus in the blood to such low levels that it is not able to cause damage to your immune system.
Once you start HIV treatment, you are likely to be taking it for the rest of your life.
The aim of HIV treatment is an ‘undetectable’ viral load. This means that the level of HIV in your blood is so low, it can’t be detected by the tests used to measure viral load. But it doesn’t mean there is no HIV at all and levels may be higher in other body fluids and parts of the body.
In addition to this section of the website, the Terrence Higgins Trust publication Your Treatment contains further information.
Guidelines developed by the British HIV Association (BHIVA, the organisation for specialist HIV doctors in the UK) set out the how HIV infection should be treated and the medical care and support people with HIV in the UK should receive.
