Episode 1: DoxyPEP: The Next Wave in STI Treatment?
DAVID:
You're listening to the Men’s Health Foundation podcast. I'm David Watson.
MARC:
I'm Marc Esposo.
DAVID:
Men’s Health Foundation is a nonprofit healthcare provider for all men specializing in gay men's health here in Los Angeles.
MARC:
Each episode we welcome members of our care team to discuss trending topics in medicine and wellness to help you take charge of your health.
DAVID:
Today we have our guests, Michael Tran and James Bon joining us today. They're both providers here at Men’s Health Foundation and I'd love to first welcome you both to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today.
MICHAEL:
Thanks for having me.
JAMES:
Yeah thanks for having us here.
DAVID:
Before we get started, I'd love to just introduce you a bit to folks and understand a little bit about your backgrounds professionally. Michael, why don't we start with you, if you could tell us a little bit about your background in medicine and sexual health?
MICHAEL:
Sure, I've been a nurse practitioner for about 4 1/2 years or so. I started my sexual health education, maybe my introduction into LGBTQIA health at the LGBT Center, worked there for about 1 1/2 to 2 years, and then I moved over here to Men’s Health [Foundation].
My biggest passion is for transgender as well as at-risk youth health, and pretty much what that means is getting them all of the services that they need for preventive services, especially PrEP, most especially PEP, and now what we're talking about today, DoxyPEP.
DAVID:
Fantastic. I just want to make sure that people understand some of these basic terms. So if you're not familiar yet with PrEP or PEP, PrEP of course is a prescription that can prevent HIV up to 99%. A lot of people might be familiar with it as a daily pill. There are definitely some options now for injectable PrEP as well, and PEP stands for post-exposure prophylaxis.
This is actually really interesting and I actually feel as if, Marc, I feel like you and I have talked about this, that maybe folks are a little less familiar with PEP and the concept of PEP than PrEP. Maybe we can start with just an understanding of what PEP is and how that works, because I think there'll be some similarities there with DoxyPEP.
MICHAEL:
Sure. James can chime in at any point, but PEP pretty much just stands for post-exposure prophylaxis and that just means, something happened and now you're trying to undo it. PrEP, which means pre-exposure means that you already have everything beforehand, ready to fight off whatever it is that you are trying to protect against.
So PEP is sort of like our last line of defense essentially. We always want to use preventive measures but PEP is pretty much our way of at least trying to help our patients feel better and pretty much undo what it is that they did essentially.
DAVID:
And it seems like what's so interesting to me about PEP is this idea that you could have been exposed to something and within a short window of time, take a medication that prevents infection or prevents you from essentially having what that is, whether that's HIV or an STI.
I mean, I remember the first time I heard about PrEP. It's like, “Wow, I never thought that would be possible!” so, it's a really exciting idea. But I think one thing that really stands out to me with that is this really narrow timeframe.
MICHAEL:
Correct. Just because you have something inside your mind doesn't mean that it's established. So in terms of infection, infection doesn't just mean tag, you're it.
It just means...let's just say, and we're just talking about HIV here. If somehow one HIV virus, one teeny, tiny little body somehow got inside your body...your body has millions of warriors and millions of armies that will fight off that one HIV. So it can't kill you. But let's just say 1,000,000 HIV virus came in all at once. And your body is like, “Oh crap. I don't know what's going on.” Then it can overwhelm the body and once it overwhelms the body then it creates an established infection. PEP is meant to stop that from happening, so PEP is the calvary.
DAVID:
Amazing and I can't wait to talk more about it because I really feel like so many people can benefit from this. I want to make sure that I introduce our other guest here, James Bon.
James, thank you so much for joining us this morning. We'd love to hear a little bit about your background, also in medicine and sexual health coming to this conversation about DoxyPEP.
JAMES:
So I'm a nurse practitioner, I’ve been a nurse practitioner since 2005. And I worked for a few years with men's clinic in Silverlake. One of their arms is a clinic every Thursday with men's health. So I did a lot of STI’s there and HIV testing and starting people on HIV medication back then. I came here at Men's Health Foundation since 2001. 2021 sorry! Yes, almost two years now. And yeah, so I am working at the Rapid Result clinic at 8280 Santa Monica Blvd.
DAVID:
Great. And thank you for doing that. And for folks who aren't familiar with the Rapid Results clinics right now, we have one in West Hollywood and one in South Los Angeles and these are clinics that you can either book an appointment or do a walk-in for some quick STI and HIV testing and treatment and also access to PrEP. And I know we also have access to some new medications as well, like mpox vaccines we've talked about PEP and also DoxyPEP, so maybe we can just get into it and explain what DoxyPEP is, what it's for, and maybe, how it works.
JAMES:
DoxyPEP is short for doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis. We use doxycycline antibiotic, which is an old antibiotic that we use to give teenagers before or even now for acne purposes. We also use it for like prophylactic for malaria in other countries that are like, you know had more malarial problem infections.
We established the safety of doxycycline already and so it's really pretty safe overall. We use the doxycycline which is 200 milligrams after sex, preferably within 24 hours up to 72 hours to make it more effective.
But you know, if you take it after 72 hours, then the benefit would not probably be more beneficial for you or anything. There's three studies that they've done. One in San Francisco and Seattle and one in France and one in Kenya. So the first one that they did was in San Francisco and Seattle and then they found out about the reduction of STIs such as chlamydia, syphilis and gonorrhea, which are about 2/3 reduction. That's a really really good number.
MICHAEL:
Yeah. And that goes back to pretty much what I talked about with the establishment of the infection. So with chlamydia and syphilis, it takes a bit of time before it can pretty much latch onto the body. The idea of DoxyPEP, same with HIV PEP, is that we're trying to bring in the cavalry enough to pretty much stop the infection from taking hold.
DAVID:
Wow, and so both of you have experience administering DoxyPEP to patients, and I'd love to hear your experience with that.
MICHAEL:
Oh, I guess I'll start first then. I think my patients are extremely thrilled about it. Many of our patients that come in, come in from all walks of life. Some use our DoxyPEP in ways to protect themselves when they're out entertaining, when they're out escorting and when they're out doing things that can be a bit risky.
DoxyPEP was able to give them that reassurance that “I may not be able to protect myself against gonorrhea, but I can protect myself against almost everything else.” Because we do have medications for everything else but gonorrhea in terms of prevention.
DAVID:
And it's interesting that you bring up gonorrhea. So can we talk a little bit about the effectiveness with DoxPEP and gonorrhea?
MICHAEL:
Doxycycline isn't that great with gonorrhea. I believe, James you can help me with this, I think it's like maybe 20 to maybe 30% so it's not our ideal for treatment of it. Pretty much the only solid treatment for gonorrhea is an injection that that we would administer at one of our Rapid Results Clinic.
And that's just because gonorrhea is just a very smart bacteria. Over the past decades or so, it's been able to mutate and develop resistances to all sorts of antibiotics. Our last one that we can...the last one that's easy for us to administer is one of those injections.
So, because of that, the CDC, which is our governmental bodies that regulate our medications and try to advise us on treatment, they basically say that let's not use that as prevention because if that goes out the door, we're all screwed.
DAVID:
Right!
JAMES:
Gonorrhea is one of our problematic bacteria, and that causes STIs. It's been developing a lot of resistance to different types of antibiotics, so the only thing that really works right now is the ceftriaxone antibiotic, which is an injection that works really well right now.
So that's our, you know, hopefully we don't have any much resistance on that one, because that's our only one that really works right now. However, they found out in the study that doxycycline, especially in the studies done in San Francisco and Seattle have that it offers about 57% reduction in our prevention in gonorrhea in some of the species already, because there are species of gonorrhea that are already resistant to doxycycline. But at least they found that at least 57% still works.
MICHAEL:
Actually a much higher percentage than I thought.
DAVID:
I read about some of the studies that you had talked about earlier James and I read about the study that I think was initially done in France and I'm hearing that in that study...that the gonorrhea that was dominant there was more resistant to doxycycline. It's interesting to just be aware of that, that you know, depending on where you are in the world that that might influence the effectiveness of this.
JAMES:
So doxycycline, it's under the class of tetracycline. They found out that gonorrhea...there are gonorrhea species...most of the gonorrhea species in that study in France, they're already majority are resistant to doxycycline. So that's why there's less effectiveness in that study compared to San Francisco and Seattle, but they found out that it really works with chlamydia and syphilis because they found out that chlamydia and syphilis...there's no resistance yet with tetracycline, so that's a good thing.
Especially with syphilis. Syphilis is, I think it's worse than gonorrhea and chlamydia because it affects our brain later on.
DAVID:
Yeah, let's, let's talk about that a little bit more because I think that there's still an opportunity for folks to become a little more familiar with these different STI's and what makes them different and what the different risks are.
MICHAEL:
Syphilis is one of our more problematic STD's, and that's just because in terms of testing, our ability to test, to figure out whether you have syphilis has not really been updated. In terms of chlamydia and gonorrhea, our recommended testing period’s around seven days, so after your last sexual encounter, if you test seven days later, we can pretty much almost guarantee that that's a very accurate test for you.
With syphilis, it takes six weeks. So if you can imagine going back, let's go back ten years ago when we didn't have PrEP for HIV. And everyone remembers then that you got to wait at least three to six months before you can really know for sure if you don't have HIV or not.
Back then it was just a giant scare personally for me, because every single time I had an encounter I was like, I have to wait a whole 6 months just to know for sure. Syphilis is kind of the same way. We have to wait almost 6 to 12 weeks. And with the change in shift in culture nowadays, with how more sexually positive everyone is, waiting six weeks is not common at all.
So because of that, we're trying to figure out as an organization and as healthcare providers, as a whole. How can we best prevent syphilis, knowing what we know now. And DoxyPEP has been a great way for us to give to our patients and give them that sort of ability to protect themselves when we know what we know.
Pretty much that unless somehow you wait a whole six weeks, the person that you're having sex with right now might have it and might not even know.
JAMES:
The best medication that can cure [syphilis] is basically penicillin. It's a penicillin shot and that works really well with preventing and curing syphilis. However for people that are already allergic to penicillin, we have an alternative. And guess what's the alternative medication for syphilis. It’s doxycycline. So, we use doxycycline for two weeks to treat syphilis so it works also.
MICHAEL:
It works both ways for both prevention and treatment.
DAVID:
I've heard some concerns just on social media of people thinking that...They'll say, oh, this is an antibiotic and that will reduce your...it will reduce the effectiveness of antibiotics or somehow be bad for you in the long run. What have you heard as far as that's concerned or what would you say to that?
JAMES:
A lot of people are concerned about resistance, and not just the regular people but also in the scientific community, in the medical community, because, you know we are really...a lot of these bugs are really developing a lot of resistance to different antibiotics which is very challenging for us.
So with that said there are, as we know, there are real resistant...tetracycline-resistant gonorrhea. So it only works...you know, it's not as high as the chlamydia and syphilis, which they don't have any resistence right now. But my take on that is, in the public health view, I think this is a very good tool. Doxycyline is a good tool.
Yeah, there is a resistance possibility still in the long-term use of doxycycline. They're studying that now and hopefully we'll get more data about that. But for now, since we have really high STIs in the community, gonorrhea, chlamydia, especially syphilis, it's a great tool to really help in reducing the risk of STIs in the community.
DAVID:
So it seems like you would say for now the benefits outweigh the risks for a lot of the folks.
JAMES:
Yeah, for now, until we have all these new data, so we will find out.
MICHAEL:
And to add on to what James said, my take is very similar to James in that, where we currently stand right now in terms of STI rates, they're always constantly rising. Some people may believe that it's due to unprotected sex, condomless sex, PrEP as a party drug, and all of that, but it really isn't.
What we notice is that those trends have always been growing regardless of those. There have been multiple studies that show people that use condoms versus people that don’t...that the rates are very, very similar. Yes, there's technically a little bit higher within the condomless use, but it's not enough to be what we call quote unquote scientifically significant.
The other thing is there's many different medical providers with many different ways of thinking, some more conservative and some more liberal. And I'm not talking in terms of politics, just in terms of how they manage their medical practice. And on the side that's leaning more conservative for more about antibiotic resistance, I completely agree. There is a risk of that and we absolutely monitor that. We should always use best practices and use up-to-date research to guide what we know.
Science is always developing and it's always updating itself, so we should never have a rigid thinking, I believe. With that in mind, doxycycline has been used for decades, decades for acne...for something as simple as an inflammation on your face and people take these for months at a time, even there are patients that take it for a year or so.
If we were to extrapolate that sort of statement and say, if there's a good chunk of people that have acne, a lot more than people that have STIs and they're on doxy for long periods of time, wouldn't we already now have some form of resistance with chlamydia and syphilis already? And if we don't, why? And that's what we're looking for now is, why haven't we? But the good news is that, while we're trying to find out the why, we do know that what James said currently, there is no resistance with chlamydia or syphilis and because of that, why not use it?
DAVID:
Right, right. So if someone came in and they believe they've maybe been exposed to one of these STI's, what would the next steps look like, at least for the folks that come in and see you?
MICHAEL:
Pretty much...because we don't know what they have, whether it's chlamydia or gonorrhea, syphilis or HIV, if they're within the periods of post exposure, then I would offer that type of treatment for them and to give a really, really clear example, let's just say someone had sex yesterday and then they came in to see one of us here at a Rapid Results clinic and they get some testing done. There's no way that test will tell us whether they're positive or not, because it's just too early. But they are within the window periods of PEP, or post-exposure. So based on their risk, we would then offer them DoxyPEP or treatment for gonorrhea.
And it just really depends on patient anxiety levels. It's really a patient-centered experience, at least personally for me, because my goal, whenever I treat my patients, is to get them feeling more like themselves because whenever you come in for any type of symptom or just for any type of advice from a medical provider you're always more anxious than when starting in and my goal is to get you less when you're walking out.
DAVID:
I love that, Michael. Thank you. I wanted to give Marc an opportunity here. Marc’s been listening attentively here, and I wanted to ask you, Marc, what are some of your questions that you've had about DoxyPEP from the research we've done so far?
MARC:
Yeah, I wanted to know...I know that there's some gaps in information from people who haven't experienced taking it yet, and one question that I found people would ask online is the effect that DoxyPEP might, may or may not have on your gut bacteria. And I was wondering if you guys could speak on that.
JAMES:
What I've read doing research that they are also concerned about the gut microbiome. So as of now, they really don't know the actual effect on the gut microbiome. But you know, we know that doxycycline is an antibiotic that could also affect other bacteria such as Staphylococcus and stuff like that.
They're trying to research that now and studying the effect on microbiome, but I would suggest I would always tell my patients to, you know, supplement yourself with probiotics when you're especially using doxycycline or any antibiotics for that matter.
MARC:
Gotcha. OK, cool. Are there any other misconceptions you can think of that people who don't know a lot about DoxyPEP that might assume and you want to address?
MICHAEL:
I do. The guidance that we have on DoxyPEP is that you should be taking it with within 24 to 72 hours of sexual post-sex. Essentially. What is a bit, not complicated, but long to also state within that piece of paper that you'll see from the pharmacy is that you don't want to take more than 200 milligrams a day. So I always also like to give my patients an example. Let's just say you had sex at 9:00 this morning today. And you said to yourself, that's it, I’m done, I'm not gonna do anymore. And then you take 2 pills. But then you get another hit on Grindr and then you do have another hook up. Do you take another 2 pills? No.
But saying that on a pharmacy bottle can be a bit much so I always try to explain to my patients, two a day. That's it. You always want to just as a safety, always make sure that...at every last sexual counter that you always top it off with two. But that means that you would wait until the next day to take your two.
DAVID:
And I'm glad you brought that up because that is something that I've got a question about which is just how this is administered, how long people typically need to take DoxyPEP for in order for it to be effective...What would happen after that period? Would they go back and get tested again just to make sure that it worked, or what? What does that look like?
MICHAEL:
To help reassure everyone on this podcast and just in general...so I always like looking at the chemical structures of medications and that’s always just been such an interest of mine because it just...it helps guide the way I practice, but it's also really really interesting to me.
Doxycycline has a pretty long, what we call half-life, which means that it lasts within our body for a long time, roughly around, I would say 12 to 24 hours. So that means that when you take 2 pills of doxycycline, it's at an amount enough that the CDC, and in medical practice, that we know will protect you against chlamydia and syphilis.
We also know how long it lasts, which is between 12 to 24 hours, leaning more towards 24 hours in our body. And that's what we call the half-life as in it’s not in 24 hours, all of the doxycycline is gone, it's just half of it is gone. So that means the next day, if you don't take any, you still tend to have around one doxycycline left. So the idea behind having DoxyPEP is and its long half-life is what creates that protection. If you have sex at 9:00 in the morning, you'll be fully protected until that following 9:00 the following day. And even then, even if you did somehow have sex again, you still have a little bit left to try to protect yourself.
DAVID:
So would you then prescribe DoxyPEP to folks for them to take it on a regular like a sort of ongoing indefinite basis?
MICHAEL:
It really just depends on how...on their sexual life. If they are planning on having sex maybe twice a week, then they probably will be on DoxyPEP maybe have half...two to three days out of that week. But if you're the type that maybe has sex once a month, then you'll probably only just need those two pills and you're perfectly fine. But regardless of how you use the DoxyPEP, as long as it's within the window period, we can safely expect that you'll be protected.
But with that in mind, we always recommend that you should always test routinely and regularly. The goal behind DoxyPEP is to protect you against chlamydia and syphilis, and the only way that we'll know is if you test regularly enough for us to see if that works for you.
DAVID:
Sure. What would you say to that, James?
JAMES:
Well, right now the current recommendation for testing is every three months. However, if you have multiple partners and you have sexual acts like at least two, twice a week, then I would probably say you know, at least come see us once a month to get tested for STI's. Just a routine STI testing.
Because the incubation period for gonorrhea and chlamydia is within a week to two weeks and then, we know that syphilis is around, a month or three months of an incubation period. So for syphilis it's OK to do every three months of testing but for gonorrhea, if you have multiple partners, at least once a month.
DAVID:
And one of the things that I remember talking to you about earlier, James, is the idea of, you know, different demographics or different communities that have either been part of the clinical trials for DoxyPEP in this case, and in some of the other groups of folks that may also benefit. And I'd love to just hear a little bit more about that.
What I'm referring to are the clinical trials to administer DoxyPEP for the purpose of this post-exposure treatment of STI's for chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis, and just the communities that were specifically involved in those studies, and if you could just tell us a little bit about that and give us some of that back story.
JAMES:
We know that during the study they actually enrolled patients, or, individuals that are MSM, which is men who have sex with men and also transgender women. Those are the study groups that they, did it on. But the thing is I have patients other than MSM and transgender women in the clinic and we have cisgender men who have sex with other women or cisgender women that also have sex with men. So we have those. The heterosexual community.
What I tell them is that...so they are very excited, especially the cisgender men about [DoxyPEP] because they have multiple female partners. So they're like “Oh, how come I never heard about this? It's so unfair. Is it only among the MSM that have STIs?” So I started discussing with them and then found out that it's appropriate to give it to them as well because of the multiple partners that they have. And they also engage in unprotected oral and vaginal sex and sometimes anal sex.
With other [cisgender] women, I have also patients that are transgender men. Now they're asking me if, like, “Would that be appropriate for me to have DoxyPEP? Because in the study that you mentioned it's mostly MSM and transgender women.”
They really didn't do much study on cisgender women and also trans men. Although, there's one study that they did in Kenya where they enrolled cisgender women, and most of them are mostly sex workers. But in that study I would tell them this as part of my discussion with them...in that study, they didn't find any significant difference between the DoxyPEP and also the standard of care. So they didn't see any benefit of DoxyPEP.
But you know, there's a lot of questions about it and why it didn't work. Maybe the vaginal makeup probably contributed to that, or maybe they're not consistent with the use of DoxyPEP in that culture. Maybe it didn't work so they’re furthering their study on that one. So I would discuss this with my transgender men and cisgender women.
And another thing is that, doxycycline also affects when you're pregnant, so women who can actually be pregnant, I have to discuss it with them that if they're pregnant...you should not be taking doxycycline.
MICHAEL:
And that could also be playing a role too, if somehow you tell the patient “Oh yeah, don't take doxycycline because it could potentially affect your ability to bear child, that definitely will make someone who is a cisgender woman or anyone that has the ability to have a womb and create a child, not take their doxycycline correctly.
I believe stigma plays a really big role. Not in just the LGBTQIA community, but also in the heterosexual community as well. And that could also be why, like what James said, some of our cisgender men are saying, “We never knew about this.” And that's just because sex positivity has been relatively new, but been embraced by the LGBTQIA community, but not so much by the heterosexual community.
And because of that, talking about sex has not been as open. And if you don't talk about sex with your friends, with your coworkers, or just anywhere, how are we supposed to spread that type of knowledge and education, right? So, whenever I treat any of my patients at one of our Rapid Results clinics it, doesn't matter whether you have...whether you're heterosexual or homosexual or however you identify yourself as or who you have sex with. It's about how many.
So if you're monogamous, both of you have already tested, you're completely committed to each other...there’s pretty much no way that you can spread any STD's between the two of you if you’ve all been tested already. But if you have multiple sexual partners, doesn't matter. I will always try my best to figure out what preventative treatments I can offer them in whatever scenario possible to make them feel more reassured, especially in our cisgender women and in our transgendered men. Yes, doxycycline is always something that I'm a bit more cautious using, but it's more about the education, not the withholding.
DAVID:
Well said, Michael. Thank you so much for sharing that. You know, one of the things that I think is really interesting about DoxyPEP and the possibilities is how this may play a role in ending the epidemics and the idea of bringing down these high syphilis rates potentially. Or just helping more folks with their sexual health. What do you predict? What do you think is a possibility here and how DoxyPEP can be a tool for that?
MICHAEL:
I'm already seeing it! Without any solid actual graphing data or absolute data, because this is just off the top of my head...early this year I have had to give many empirical bicillin which is penicillin treatment for syphilis. But during the later half of this year, once we started offering DoxyPEP, once more people understood it, once the community has been using it more, I've been giving a lot less bicillin and I don't know about you James, but have you been noticing that you've been having to treat less syphilis during the later half of this year?
JAMES:
Yeah, I totally noticed that.
MICHAEL:
Yeah, so, without any solid data, but just from our own personal data, from just seeing outpatients, we've seen a dramatic reduction in syphilis cases, and that's just from usage here in West Hollywood and in South LA. Can you imagine if we were able to get this knowledge out to pretty much all of the U.S.?
DAVID:
Oh, wow! Oh, it's so amazing to hear too!
MICHAEL:
And doxycycline is so cheap and so affordable. Many of my patients from South LA, they come in as uninsured. How are they gonna afford this medication? Yes, we offer it here at our clinic, but there are also ways...if they don't want to come into our clinic to get the medication, I can prescribe it to a pharmacy near them.
And many of my undocumented patients that I see down there, or just the ones that don't want to give up their personal data or personal information, I'm always able to tell them, “If you need DoxyPEP I will find a way to get you it.”
DAVID:
Thank you, Michael. You know, we're getting close to time here. I did want to just make sure that I ask is there anything we haven't covered on the topic of DoxyPEP that we should definitely make sure to let our listeners know about?
JAMES:
Basically DoxyPEP is doxycycline. You take 200 milligrams of it within 24, preferably within 24 hours after sex. Any unprotected condomless, oral, anal, vaginal sex is considered unprotected, including oral. And I also tell them that also rimming will be considered part of it as well. Either receiving or giving it. Within 24 to 72 hours will give you about 80% effectiveness in preventing chlamydia and syphilis and also about 57 to 70% in some strains of gonorrhea.
MICHAEL:
And that's over a spectrum. The sooner that you start, you'll be closer to 80%. The later that you start, the closer you are to maybe the percent that James was talking about.
JAMES:
And I think the one thing that we haven't discussed is some people are concerned about the side effects and how this affects you know what happens when you take doxycycline. A lot of people are complaining about nausea when they take it. Now, it is best absorbed in an empty stomach. However, a lot of people are complaining that they feel sick and feel nauseated when they take it.
MICHAEL:
I think it's because they were taking...many of my patients and maybe with yours too, James, is that it's because you're taking 2 pills at once. Most people generally can tolerate 100 milligrams just fine, but it's taking 200 all at once that tends to cause the stomach upset.
Like James said, on an empty stomach is always best. It's not ideal, but because of what I know about how long the half-life is of doxycycline that's how I'm able to recommend this advice. You can take 100 milligrams and then wait an hour and then take your second 100 milligrams. And we know that yes, that's not ideal, but within one hour period is not going to cause that much of a difference between how long it's going to stay in your system to protect you. But, it will reduce the side effects because within an hour your body has already digested the first one.
JAMES:
Or I tell them that they can also take it with some food. And then of course, lots of fluids, like lots of water.
DAVID:
OK, well, this is really exciting. I think I should mention to you know, some folks have talked about how of course with herpes and hepatitis and obviously HIV, DoxyPEP is not a solution for those things...mpox as well, or any other viral infections.
DoxyPEP would not apply but of course we've got treatment options for those as well. I wanted to make sure that I ask you both just how folks can find out more, maybe get access to DoxyPEP if that's something they would identify as a good candidate for, or where they can go to learn more.
MICHAEL:
You're more than welcome to walk into any of our Rapid Results clinics. We try to make it as easy or accessible to our patients. And in terms of the medication, we always have it in stock, or, we try to anyways, (knock on wood), to have it in stock at our clinics. And in terms of actual readable materials, I think James might know a bit more about that than I do.
JAMES:
Well, if you need any other...or have questions, of course you can just walk in any of our Rapid clinic in 8601 and or in 8280. So Michael is in at 8601 and I'm at 8280 Santa Monica Blvd. They can just walk in there and you know if they have any questions about it, you know we can definitely talk to them about it.
And then there's a lot of also questions: “How affordable is it? Is it expensive?” Well, there's a lot of patients of mine that have no insurance and also don’t have, you know, work. I tell them like it's between like $5 to like $25 for a month’s supply, which is a pretty good price. It's pretty cheap and affordable, and you know it's very accessible and you can just walk in any of our clinics and then ask about DoxyPEP. And then you can also make an appointment online to see us.
DAVID:
That's right and that's at menshealthfound.org and the locations we were talking about earlier, that's 8280 Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood and 8601 S Broadway in South Los Angeles here for Men’s Health Foundation.
Of course, if you're listening from other parts of the country, other parts of the world, I think some of the best resources would be LGBT-affirmative providers if that is accessible to you through nonprofits like ours. I think we can definitely testify to the benefits of LGBTQ-affirmative providers who understand and who are able to break through that stigma in a judgment-free zone for these kinds of experiences.
Of course, what we've heard today from James and from Michael is it sounds like anyone or certainly people outside of the LGBTQ community could also benefit from this, or people who are men having sex with men who maybe don't identify as LGBTQ. I think that it's important to make sure that everyone is aware of this great new treatment, this great new opportunity to help in the epidemics for gonorrhea, syphilis, and chlamydia, Michael and James, I want to thank you so much for your time. You know, we've got a lot more topics that we can definitely cover when it comes to men's health and sexual health. Thank you again very much.
MICHAEL:
Thank you so much for having us.
JAMES:
Thank you very much.
DAVID:
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Men’s Health Foundation Podcast. The information and opinion shared in this podcast are for educational purposes only. For medical advice, please talk with your primary care physician or a medically licensed professional.
MARC:
To learn more about Men's Health Foundation, please visit our website at menshealthfound.org. You can also follow us on Instagram at menshealthfound and subscribe to our YouTube channel.