Hyperthermia as a health treatment goes back a long time – possibly to Egyptian times when they found inducing a high fever cured many ills. It’s now been rediscovered and its use over the past 20 years at St George Hospital in Germany has shown Borrelia cannot withstand prolonged periods where the body temperature is raised to 41.6 °C or 106.88 °F. The same temperatures have been shown to trigger the destruction of cancer cells. So now, Whole Body Hyperthemia is a therapy which is being used more and more around the world.

At St George Hospital in Bad Aibling, Germany, the doctors induce a temperature of of 41.6 degrees Celsius and they hold the patient at this temperature for two hours, which kills an extremely high percentage of the Borrelia bacteria they have.

The healing effects of fever…

We’ve known about the healing effects of fever for a long time – virtually since antiquity. Why else would the human body induce a fever in order to get better? The improvement of many chronic diseases has often been observed following high fevers caused by infections. In the past, many patients were sent to malarial areas in order to contract an infection that would cause a high fever.

When antibiotics were introduced around 1950, fever came to be seen not as a positive immune response by the body, but instead as an additional condition, which was suppressed with medication. It was only at the end of the last century where there was a change in thinking about the importance of fever in medicine. This was not least due to the increase in resistance of bacteria to antibiotics, bringing a need for new ways to defeat and eliminate infection.

Mode of action of extreme whole-body hyperthermia

The Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium is thermolabile and has difficulty withstanding high fever. It dies at a temperature of 41.6 °C/ 106.88 °F. So when the Whole Body Hyperthermia treatment is given to patients, they are sustained at this temperature for a period of two hours, in order to ensure an extremely high percentage of the Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium are killed.

At the same time, the elevated temperature activates macrophages (cells that engulf and digest microbes) within the body, which can eliminate the bacteria.

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Whole-body hyperthermia in Lyme disease:

The St George Hospital treatment program in Bad Aibling, Germany

At St George Hospital, they have successfully treated more than 800 patients with chronic Lyme disease and seen their dramatic improvement, as the bacteria, wherever they were located in the body, were killed by Whole Body Hyperthermia, immediately stopping the production of neurotoxins. They have also developed their own tailored detoxification programs for the elimination of neurotoxins. The endocrine disorders that are often present in chronic Lyme disease such as hypothyroidism, adrenal insufficiency or sexual disorders also need to be addressed.

As chronic Lyme disease is multisystemic and can mimic a wide variety of diseases, treatment can also be complex. However, the focus is on the elimination of Borrelia through Whole Body Hyperthermia. Everything else follows from this and serves to secure the success achieved by Whole Body Hyperthermia and return the patient to life, after what has often been a long history of suffering.

There are some instances where Whole Body Hyperthermia is not recommended for Lyme patients and these include:

• pronounced myelosuppression
• pronounced cardiac/pulmonary insufficiency > 2nd degree
• thrombosis, treatment with phenprocoumon or warfarin
• cerebral hypoperfusion
• lymphedema

Side effects: A range of cardiovascular problems, hypotension, tachycardia, arrhythmias, etc. can occur during treatment, although these can be reduced to a minimum through careful preparation. At St Georg Klinik in Germany, they have carried out Whole Body Hyperthermia more than 18,000 times in the last twenty years and side effects such as these have only occurred in less than one percent of cases.

Because the blood vessels expand during the heating phase, a slight drop in blood pressure is often observed. This can be countered through increased fluid replacement or the use of volume replacement solutions.

Seizures are extremely rare and are treated with intravenous diazepam. With proper positioning, only about three percent of patients experience lesions caused by thermal pressure. Burning on urination is normal within the first 36 hours, but requires treatment in protracted cases. Careful selection of patients in compliance with the above recommendations can reduce the risks associated with systemic whole-body hyperthermia to a minimum. In general, this form of therapy is considered to be highly effective and well tolerated.