The fact is, every time you take a "holiday" from HIV medication and miss a dose, you are giving the virus an opportunity to weaken your immune system. Missing a dose gives HIV a green light to make millions of copies of itself. So, when you're on a treatment "holiday," so is your HIV.

Just like when you come back from a real vacation tanned and feeling refreshed, your HIV returns from a treatment "holiday" with a whole new source of energy. Treatment "holidays" provide HIV an opportunity to change itself, a process called mutation, making your drugs less effective in protecting you in the future. This ability of the HIV in your body to make your drugs less effective is called resistance. You and your healthcare provider may even have to switch your current therapy to find a new combination of drugs that are effective against the mutated HIV in your body.

Skipping 1 or many doses of your HIV medicine is a risk simply not worth taking. You can avoid giving HIV the upper hand in your treatment by always having enough medicine in your blood to stop HIV. How do you do this? The answer is simple: take all your drugs, all the time, and exactly the way your healthcare provider told you.