Hyperthermia Update
Quite some time ago, I wrote about hyperthermia as a complementary therapy for cancer treatment. Since then, it has become of even greater interest to the oncologist community. Dr. Josef Issels, a 20th century German physician improved a concept he called “sweat therapy” or induced hyperthermia. Used for centuries in Europe to treat chronic diseases, it causes a pronounced increase in white blood cell count. The white blood cells are the core of the disease fighting antibodies of the body. Dr. Issels administered monthly “fever shots” to patients which induced a high fever for up to five hours. In 1984, the FDA approved this practice as a valid cancer treatment. Five years later, the National Cancer Institute stated that heat therapy increases the effectiveness of other treatments by 25 to 35 percent.
A recent Boston Globe article observed that traditional therapies offer little to help shrink cancerous tumors. The article went on to say that, according to clinical studies, when tumors are treated with radiation therapy and hyperthermia in combination, they tend to shrink, sometimes dramatically.
Last month, a breaking news article in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute again drew attention to hyperthermia. The article reported that a randomized trial in Europe showed that patients given chemotherapy plus hyperthermia had a median disease-free survival period of almost twice that of those who got chemotherapy alone. Elizabeth Repasky, Ph.D., of Roswelll Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, N.Y., commented on the trial results, “We are on a verge, I think, of a major new adjuvant cancer therapy that will not replace chemotherapy or radiation, but will make them work a lot better.”
That is what complementary therapies prescribed by integrative oncologists are all about–making conventional treatments work a lot better. Of course, there is always hope that some of these evidence-based therapies will become breakthroughs that lead to beating the disease altogether. The heartbreaker is that relatively few oncologists today practice any of the complementary therapies including hyperthermia. They rely exclusively on toxic drugs and radiation. The new strategy for the war on cancer hopes to change that.