Using heat to kill cancer cells
This review is about whole-body Hyperthermia and its use to treat cancer. While hyperthermia used locally can liquify tumours, hyperthermia used as a whole-body treatment can improve the effectiveness of standard radiotherapy, chemotherapy and ’alternative’ cancer-starving therapies. One London Hospital Oncologist quoted below, believes that every UK cancer hospital should have a hyperthermia unit, such is the significant improvement in 5-year survival and the potential to ’cure’ cancer, while another mainstream Doctor calls it ’a promising way to improve cancer treatment’.
Whole-body hyperthermia has history as a cancer treatment
Most of us have experienced the positive effects of a hot bath on aching muscles, or the balm of holiday sun on an English winter body. Heat just feels good.
We use heat for healing in many ways – for instance a hot water bottle on the tummy for period pains or a microwave-heated wheat-pack on stiff and aching neck muscles. For centuries, humans have benefited from sweating – from Turkish baths to the saunas in modern spas. The Egyptianstreated tumours with heat back in 5,000 BC; Parminides, a Greek Physician in 500BC said ’Give me a chance to create a fever, and I will cure any disease’.
Modern medicine also noted that cancer patients who developed a fever sometimes went into remission. Such an observation prompted Memorial Sloan-Kettering Doctor William Coley in 1891 to publish a paper on how inducing a fever in the body of a cancer patient might stimulate the immune response and cause cancer remission. Subsequently, Coley developed the use of certain bacteria to generate a fever, although results were mixed. Coley’s Toxins, or vaccines, were used with varying success up until the Thalidomide problems, when the FDA demanded Clinical Trials. This effectively stopped their use. Similarly German Studies also fell foul of regulators.
What was interesting was that where Coley’s Toxins had an effect, it was thought due to a ’total’ healing experience. Not merely the product of a heightened immune system, the tissues fought to cleanse themselves, while the raised body temperature seemed to actually ’liquify’ the cancer cells.
Read Full Article at Cancer Active