But a year after she was diagnosed, another HIV test came back indeterminate and a subsequent test was negative. Frustrated and angry, Maggiore desperately searched for answers. The more she read, the more questions she had.

Maggiore's controversial book, What if Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?, questions the most basic medical and scientific findings about the disease.

Activists and many AIDS experts have attacked her for her dissident views, but Maggiore's influence is growing, and her voice has been heard across the country and around the world.

Read the transcript of our live chat with Maggiore, below.

"The idea that HIV causes AIDS is an idea that has not been proven to be correct or true," you told ABCNEWS' 20/20. "There are many valid, vital reasons to go back and rethink what we've been told." Why, in your view, should we question the most basic medical and scientific findings about the disease?

My son will be 4 in two weeks and he's far above average in every stage of his physical and mental development and has never been sick.

Normally, pregnancy causes a certain degree of immune suppression in healthy, HIV-negative women. Even in these particular circumstances, I'm ridiculously healthy.

The estimates currently for South Africa are between 4 and 5 million cases of HIV/AIDS. However, actual diagnosed cases of AIDS for the past 20 years number less eathan 13,000, and during the AIDS epidemic there has been no increase in infant mortality rates in South Africa. The average life expectancy is at an all-time high, the population grows at a healthy 3% annually, and death rates from all causes including AIDS are less than 1% annually.

In India, for example, it's estimated that in 1999, close to 2 million people died of AIDS in that yr alone. Officially counted AIDS cases, however, for the entire AIDS epidemic are just over 11,000.

The media favors harrowing estimates over the less concerning actual numbers.

I'm sure if you met my family you might think differently about your assumption regarding my choices.

For example, I know a man in San Francisco who has been HIV-positive, healthy, and taking no AIDS drugs since 1986. Although he's never been ill, he was excluded from a study of healthy HIV-positives because his T-cell count was 62 lower than the study's entry level requirement.

Despite the lack of properly-constructed studies, there are numerous published reports showing that HIV-positives who live in health tend to stay away from AIDS drugs or have only taken them for a brief period of time and engage in proper nutrition, exercise, healthy life choices and have a healthy mental outlook.

It wasn't until a year later, after becoming a public speaker and educator for several prominent AIDS organizations and being on the board of Women at Risk, that I had the personal experience of going from HIV-positive to indeterminate, to positive to negative to positive.

Since none of what I was taught to teach others explained my conflicting test results, I began to look deeper into the AIDS education I was given and was sharing with others. It was then I found a body of compelling medical, scientific, and epidemiological data that brought into question almost everything I had accepted as true about HIV and AIDS.

That was in 1994.

With regard to our son, we feel very strongly that subjecting him to a test that neither tests for the presence of the virus itself or is able to accurately indicate the presence of HIV specific antibodies is something we can't ethically support.

Our pediatrician and our family's doctor stand behind our choices and we all have records of regular medical care showing we are far above average in our health.

With regard to vitamins and supplements, when I tested positive, I got frightened into taking a variety of nutritional supplements and eating an organic whole food diet that I still practice today. Ironically, since testing positive, I have enjoyed the best health of my life and plan to continue making healthy choices.

I just want to emphasize that I am not unique. There are hundreds, thousands of HIV-positives world wide, from Arkansas to Zambia, who live in health and defy the established beliefs about HIV and AIDS.

Our voices and our stories are rarely heard, which to me is one of the greatest tragedies of AIDS. We offer inspiration, hope and possibilities for alternative research and are ignored, dismissed or as in the case of Dr. Matilda Krim declared "delusional."

The Lazarus effect, widely reported in the media following the release of the new AIDS drugs in 1996, has never been shown to occur within the confines of any controlled medical study.

I certainly do not deny and am very happy for cases in which these powerful drugs have provided people with short-term, sometimes lifesaving health benefits. However, the most recent scientific data shows this effect sometimes occurs because the drugs, contrary to common assumptions, are not HIV-specific — that is, they wipe out the proteases that cause such AIDS-defining illnesses as PCP pneumonia and candida.

We must also remember that these drugs were released a full year after AIDS deaths had peaked in this country and three years after AIDS cases had been declining.

And in 1996 — the banner year for claims of wondrous results — according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, less than 20% of HIV-positives who "needed" these drugs actually held prescriptions for them.

One more important point: Since 1993, when we changed the definition of AIDS in this country to include people who test HIV-positive and are clinically healthy and symptom-free, but who have, at any one time, a T-cell count of 200 or less, more than half of our AIDS cases have been diagnosed in perfectly healthy people. If you consider that for the past 8 years the majority of AIDS victims are clinically well, we could reasonably expect to see the improved survival rate popularly attributed to the availability of the new drugs.

The AIDS definition has been changed several times. To learn more, I urge you to log on to the Alive & Well Web site (www.questionaids.com) where you can read the first 10 chapters of my book for free.

I do question the very narrow officially-sanctioned approaches to understanding and resolving AIDS. I don't believe that the practice of grouping 29 disconnected, disparate diseases under a single category called "AIDS" facilitates scientific progress, the identifying of practical, healthy, individualized solutions or brings us any closer to understanding the mechanism of immune suppression.

It's important to understand that all of the diseases and conditions called AIDS have well-known causes and treatments that have nothing to do with HIV and that they all can and do occur in people who are HIV-negative. All these conditions pre-date the use of the category "AIDS" and all pre-date the discovery of HIV.

I would urge you to visit the study proposal at our website, (Search for Solutions,) which is our own approach to resolving AIDS through individualized diagnosis and non-toxic therapies based on specific need.

Also, in 1992, I was part of an HIV-positive women's support group. Most of the women were married to men who had also tested positive. These women ranged from Latina to Thai, Japanese, Eastern European. We noticed that their husbands who were on the drugs and presumably "infected with the same strain of the virus" all died while their wives, who for one reason or another were not taking the drugs, were fine — devastated and worried, but fine.

To me this indicates that ethnic make-up or the idea of certain strains affecting outcome are not well-founded, and I see no properly-prepared scientific research suggesting otherwise.

I'm not a medical doctor, and even the best doctor could not responsibly or accurately offer an explanation for your son's death without access to his complete medical records.

If you're willing and able to explore the possibility that given all his options and choices there may have been a different outcome for your son, I would be happy to forward his medical records and history to a pathologist on our scientific advisory board who would engage in what's known as a "differential diagnosis" — that is, a diagnosis based on the factual data contained in his medical records rather than the assumption that HIV was the cause of his illness and death.

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