I went to the dermatologist today. Everything checked out fine. All my moles are (still) normal. All the new lesions are also normal, and have a name: Reiter’s Syndrome. And when it shows up the lesions are called psoriasis. This includes the big lesions on my tongue. A quick google search reveals an academic paper linking Reiter’s Syndrome to IFN (that costs money, and arrives by mail?), and a Reagan era NYTimes article discussing AIDS and Reiter’s syndrome. It is unclear to me how much of this science is still accurate (it was 1987, and they didn’t really know that much about HIV/AIDS) but they argue that HIV suppresses one part of the immune system and allows the other part (the Interferons) to flourish:
”AIDS patients have high levels of interferon and it is known that when we give interferon to patients with cancer they develop psoriasis,” Dr. Winchester said. ”It is possible that high levels of interferon may induce both psoriasis and Reiter’s syndrome.”
The presence of Interferon, whether as a result of HIV/AIDS or a result of Interferon treatment, results in a psoriasis and Reiter’s syndrome.
I don’t have HIV/AIDS, but I do have one of the most common side effects of the disease, because the two share the same mechanism – interferon.