AIDS: Remarks made by John S. James, newsletter editor, at an April 28, 1996 meeting are summarized. There has been relatively little research on alternative HIV/AIDS treatments. The absence of alternative treatments is a great loss to the developing world. The current Food and Drug Administration (FDA) leadership has deregulated the AIDS drug approval process, now going out of its way to find official, legal ways to give the medical community as a whole access to the AIDS drugs that it wants. However, there has been difficulty moving from early work and results on a drug to the credible human data on activity or efficacy; early work is usually in the laboratory. For alternative treatments, the bottleneck occurs after the treatment is already in human use and there are no generally accepted scientific studies or data to support its benefit. Suggestions for overcoming the gap between the use of alternative treatments and the credible data showing its possible activity or effectiveness are: viral load testing, developing less cumbersome and expensive ways than controlled clinical trials to obtain credible initial data, investigating existing obstacles to credibility, better standardization and handling of patient data, and equal communication with indigenous and traditional healers. One potential resource for starting this process is the use of ExtraMED, a new database created by the World Health Organization.