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. The visual blog "Information is Beautiful" deduced that, while taking creative licence 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". The film implies that the drug and vitamin regime 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." 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). 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. 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". 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. 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. 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."