Dallas Buyers Club

Historical accuracy

Logo of the Dallas Buyers Club

The characters of Rayon and Dr. Eve Saks were fictional; the writers had interviewed transgender AIDS patients, activists, and doctors for the film and combined these stories to create the two composite supporting roles.[95] However, Woodroof did lose all his friends after they found out he was HIV-positive. In his interviews with Borten, Woodroof implied that this, along with interactions with gay people living with AIDS through the buyers club, led to a rethinking of his apparent anti-gay sentiments and changed his views on gay people. Other people who knew him said that he did not harbor anti-gay sentiments; the real Woodroof was openly bisexual and assumed he had contracted HIV from sexual encounters with men.[96][97] Also, while a rodeo enthusiast, he never rode any bulls himself.[95] Although the film shows Woodroof diagnosed in 1985, he told Borten that a doctor had informed him he might have had the disease well before that; Woodroof believed that he may have been infected in 1981, something that was briefly alluded to in a flashback in the film.[19]

While Woodroof was known for outlandish behavior, according to those who knew him, both the film and McConaughey made him rougher than he actually was; The Dallas Morning News has reported that Woodroof was "outrageous, but not confrontational" and that people who knew him felt that his portrayal as "rampantly homophobic" early in the film was inaccurate.[98] The real Woodroof also had a sister and a daughter who were not approached by the writers and were left out of the script to make the film more of a character study.[19]

The visual blog Information is Beautiful deduced that, while taking creative license into account, the film was 61.4% accurate when compared to real-life events, summarizing that the film seemed "like an authentically true-story with liberties taken".[99]

Drug treatments

The film implies that the drug and vitamin regimen promoted by Woodroof was safer and more effective than the drugs being issued in hospitals and tested by the FDA at the time, but this has been criticized by numerous observers. Daniel D'Addario, in an article in Salon, suggests that "the film's take is perilously close to endorsing pseudoscience."[100]

Woodroof frequently declares that the drug AZT (azidothymidine) is ineffective and counter-productive, yet years later it is still prescribed to patients with AIDS, albeit at a much lower dose (as mentioned in the epilogue).[101] Medical historian Jonathan Engel, who wrote The Epidemic: A History of AIDS, states that AZT was in fact a relatively effective treatment for the period, consistently prolonging lives for a year at a time when AIDS had a 100% mortality rate.[102] Journalist David France, who directed the documentary How to Survive a Plague, suggested that AZT was actually "the first element of a cocktail of drugs that ended the era of AIDS-as-death sentence".[100] Initial attempts to use high doses of AZT proved to be no more effective than smaller doses, but HIV/AIDS activist Peter Staley (who was consulted by the filmmakers) believes this was not the result of any conspiracy – initially medical researchers had to guess what dose would be effective and they feared a low dose would be ineffective.[102] Eventually, researchers realized that AZT was ineffective in the long term because the HIV virus mutated and became resistant to the treatment. By the mid-1990s, David Ho and other researchers found AZT was quite effective when used in conjunction with two other anti-virals, which decreased the chances of virus developing resistance to any one drug.[102][4]

The treatments that Woodroof did promote were less-effective at best, or at worst, dangerous. According to Staley, Woodroof became a proponent of Peptide T, a treatment which "never panned out. It's a useless therapy, and it never got approved, and nobody uses it today, but the film implies that it helped him."[102] DDC, also promoted by Woodroof, did prove to be an effective antiviral treatment, but it also proved to have worse side effects than AZT, with the potential to cause irreversible nerve damage in some cases. As a result, it was only used by doctors for a relatively short time.[102] A third treatment promoted by Woodroof, called Compound Q (Trichosanthin), was specifically linked to two deaths during trials, and therefore, was not used by doctors thereafter. Most "buyers clubs" stopped providing it as well, but Woodroof continued to dispense it, part of the reason for Woodroof's conflict with the FDA.[102]


This content is from Wikipedia. GradeSaver is providing this content as a courtesy until we can offer a professionally written study guide by one of our staff editors. We do not consider this content professional or citable. Please use your discretion when relying on it.