Stephenson:Neal:The Confusion:9:Syphilis cured by fever (Neal Stephenson)

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This is based on a remark in Edward Rice's "Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton" (ISBN 0684191377) in which it is conjectured that Burton's syphilis was cured by a twenty-day attack of "marsh fever" that he suffered in 1857 when he and Speke were on their epic safari into Africa in search of the source of the Nile. The supposed mechanism is that the spirochete responsible for syphilis is killed by fever.

This anecdote is supported by a short article by Heidi Schultz on page 1 in the August 2005 issue of National Geographic: Give Me Fever Neurosyphilis, a form of syphilis that causes mental illness and paralysis, once meant sure death. Mercury, the common treatment for syphilis for centuries, could not cure it. By the 19th Century, however, psychiatrists noticed that in rare cases of remission, neurosyphili patients had often contracted a disease such as typhoid that caused high fever. Some doctors started injecting a curable form of malaria, which triggered fevers exceeding 104 degrees Farenheit, into the neurosyphilis victims. A dangerous option- but with death the only other one, fever therapy remained widespread until the 1940s, when penicillin became the drug of choice for syphilis. - Heidi Schultz

Medterms.com Medical Definition of Fever Therapy

Using abnormal elevations in body temperature as a tool to treat disease. This was done in the past by deliberately raising the patient's temperature to cause fever.

Fever therapy was pioneered by the Austrian neuropsychiatrist Julius Wagner von Jauregg (1857-1940). He inoculated the malarial parasite into patients with dementia paralytica, the third and final stage of syphilis when it affects the nervous system and brain. The patients not surprisingly developed malaria with a high fever and the fever halted the relentless course of the syphilis.

In 1927 Wagner von Jauregg received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for his discovery of the therapeutic value of malaria inoculation in the treatment of dementia paralytica."

Fever therapy is rarely, if ever, used nowadays. Sometimes, however, a patient with a very high fever from an infection upon recovery from the infection enters into a seemingly impossible remission from an unrelated disease or is even cured of it! (This writer has cared for two such remarkable patients.)

Now Known As "The Issels Therapy" For Treating Cancer

FEVER THERAPY: RESTORING REGULATORY MECHANISMS - A POWERFUL IMMUNE ENHANCEMENT An Overview by Ilse Marie Issels, 2002 Fever therapy, or pyretotherapy, is the induction of fever under clinical conditions for therapeutical purposes. Clinical research suggests that fever is one of the body's most effective means to restore its complex regulatory, repair and defense mechanisms.

Historically, Greek physicians of the antiquity used the curative effects of fever to treat a variety of diseases, including syphilis, tuberculosis, and others. However, modern linear-mechanistic thinking regards fever as a symptom of illness which has to be fought and suppressed. Fever is not recognized and therapeutically used anymore as the (desirable) symptom of the body's fight against bacterial, viral, or other invaders, and self-generated dangers to health.

There are many ways of raising the body's temperature. The most well known natural means are hot baths, steam baths, saunas, among others. The rise in body temperature achieved by these means is, however, not understood as fever. Neither is hyperthermia (originating from the Greek language "hyper" meaning "higher" or "excess" and "thermia" meaning "heat") called fever therapy. In hyperthermia treatment "excess heat" is directed to parts of the body or the whole body by the use of devices (e.g. microwave or ultra short wave). Hyperthermia has become an adjunct weapon in the treatment of various cancers, as cancer cells are more sensitive to heat than healthy cells. It works by heat destruction, as well as by stimulating the immune system through heat-shock proteins that present on the surface of heat-treated cancer cells.

The raise of the body's temperature through the above mentioned means is artificially provoked from the outside, and may be called "passive" fever.

The term fever therapy applies when the body's "temperature control center" in the tuber cinereum of the mid brain is irritated by certain stimuli and induced to autonomically develop a febrile reaction: "active" fever. Special herbal preparations such as mistletoe lectins, among others, biological autologous preparations (from the patient's own body tissues and fluids), biological homologous preparations, or mixed bacterial vaccines have been successfully used to induce fever.

William B. Coley, who was the Attending Bone Surgeon at Memorial Hospital, now Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, from 1893 to 1936, pioneered fever therapy in cancer. He observed that several sarcoma patients, and especially one patient suffering from recurrent inoperable sarcoma of the neck, experienced tumor remission after developing erysipelas, a superficial streptococcal infection of the skin accompanied by high fever.

He pursued his studies and developed a vaccine that became known as Coley's Toxins or Mixed Bacterial Vaccines, MBV. These vaccines contain a combination of heat killed gram positive Streptococcus pyogenes and gram negative Bacillus prodigiosus, now called Serratia marcescens. In 1943, M.J. Shears, researcher at the National Cancer Institute, discovered that the biologically active substance in Coley's Toxins is lipopolysaccharide (LPS) that occurs in the cell walls of gram-negative bacteria.

Coley's Toxins fall within the field of immunotherapy and have been gaining attention by cancer research.

Administered intramuscularly or intravenously, depending on individual conditions of patients who qualify for this treatment, these vaccines induce fever for several hours, which subsides on its own. During the rise of the fever, patients get chills and feel flu-like symptoms, such as headache, back pain, nausea and pain in the tumor area. Tumors may swell during the fever treatment and sometimes, a few days thereafter, patients notice already a reduction in tumor size. Usually patients developing high temperatures up to 104 F, feel better more quickly than patients whose temperature remains below 102 F.

Fever therapy by Coley's Toxins or Mixed Bacterial Vaccines provokes a power ful reaction of the immune system. Research studies explain the anti tumor effect of Coley's Toxins through induction of interferon, augmentation of natural killer cell activity, stimulation of lymphoid tissues, activation of macrophages, induction of serum factor that causes necrosis of tumors, as well as stimulation of interleukin 2.

Fever therapy has not only a significant effect on the immune system, i.e. the constitutive lympho-reticular defense zone, but on all the defense zones, and especially the reticulo-histiocytary defense zone, i.e the pluripotent mesenchyme. This defense zone, also referred to as the "regulatory ground system" by Pischinger and Heine is the system of basic regulation.

It consists of the cells of the connective tissues, the fluid and semi-fluid of the extra cellular space, and the solid extra cellular matrix, also known as the ground substance whose properties vary with each specific type of connective tissue. Every cell is intimately linked to and depends on its surrounding medium: the extra cellular space, i.e. the extra cellular fluid from which it absorbs the nutrients and to which it releases the waste products of its metabolism.

The regulatory ground system fulfills many vital tasks, such as stem cell function and formation of all types of blood cells; transit functions allowing communication and interactivity of nerves, blood cells, the lymph system, and organs; maintenance of homeostasis; detoxification; storage (of nutrients and toxins); and defense.

In view of its importance to all basic regulatory processes, the ground system plays a decisive role in the origin, prevention and treatment of chronic diseases and cancer. A prolonged disturbance of this system will result in a dysfunction of cells, organs and organ systems, and ultimately in an impairment of the repair and immune mechanisms. In the case of cancer a mal-functioning immune system (immune surveillance) cannot properly detect and neutralize cancer cells that are a daily occurrence in every vertebrate organism. These cells can settle down at the site of least resistance and form a malignant tumor. Experience has shown, however, that restored regulatory, repair and immune functions can alter the medium, the extra cellular space surrounding the cancer cells, to an extent that induces cancer cells to re-differentiate, i.e. revert to normal cells. Normal healthy cells die when they have fulfilled their task. This programmed cell death is called apoptosis.

In disease prevention every effort should be made to avoid the persistence of noxious influences that will disturb the regulatory ground system. In chronic disease and cancer, experience indicates that therapeutic endeavors reach their optimum when they include measures that restore the proper functioning of the regulatory ground system.

One of these measures is fever therapy. During high fever, the internal environment of the body, on the cellular as well as the humoral levels, undergoes a fundamental change and all defensive and recuperative powers are brought to a high pitch.

Febrile reactions stimulate the mobilization and elimination of metabolic residues and other unwanted deposits from the storage cells of the mesenchyme. They clear toxicants from latent congenital infections (e.g. TB), as well as from acute and chronic infections the body was not able or not allowed (overuse of antibiotics, steroids) to get rid of by developing an autonomic febrile reaction. These deposits, if not eliminated, reduce the storage capacity of the mesenchyme, and simultaneously the ability of immunocompetent tissues to react.

The pluripotent mesenchyme, i.e. the regulatory ground system, will become impaired in the fulfillment of its many vital tasks. A mesenchymal "block", in parallel with a lowering of the defense potential may result, which is considered by many authors as a major precondition for the development of chronic degenerative diseases and cancer.

Fever therapy has shown to be one of the most effective ways of cleansing the internal terrain, re-establishing homeostasis, lifting the "blockade" of the system of basic regulation, and restoring immune mechanisms to normal function.

Starting in 1951, in his hospital in Germany, Josef M. Issels, M.D. administered several 100.000 fever treatments without any adverse side effects or complications to thousands of his patients suffering from progressive metastatic cancer. Studies carried out in his hospital showed the remarkable immune enhancing effect of fever therapy. One study involving the administration of mixed bacterial vaccines similar to Coley's Toxins compared the patients' white blood count of the morning before fever therapy with the count of 24 hours after the peak of the fever. The values rose temporarily, e.g. from 4,000 to 10,000, from 6,000 to 20,000 and from 9,000 to 40,000. They normalized gradually during the next few days.

Other studies at the Issels hospital showed that in various types of advanced cancer, chemotherapy could be reduced by one third, sometimes half, of the commonly prescribed dosage with the same cytotoxic effect, when it was administered at the peak of the fever, thus considerably reducing toxic side effects.

Fever therapy has been an integral part of the comprehensive Issels Therapy.

Clinical research suggests that the restoration of the non-specific regulatory mechanisms of the ground system appears to be an important precondition for specific immunotherapy to reach its optimal effect.

References:

• Coley-Nauts, H., Fouler, G.A., M.D., Bogatko, F.H., M.D. "A Review of the Influence of Bacterial Infection and of Bacterial Products (Coley's Toxins) on Malignant Tumors in Men" 1953, Stockholm.
• Heine, H., M.D. "Matrix and Matrix Regulation" Significance of the extracellular matrix. Lecture at Biological Therapy Symposium, 1992, Lisbon, Portugal.
• Issels, J.M., M.D. "Cancer: A Second Opinion" 1999, New York, Avery Publ. Group ISBN 0-89529-992-5.
• Wiemann, B., Starnes, Ch.O. "Coley's Toxins, Tumor Necrosis Factor and Cancer research: A Historical Perspective" 1994, Pharmac.Ther. Vol. 64, 529-564.

Modern Practice of Fever Therapy At Home

Fever is one of the body's most important defensive reactions to an infection. Unfortunately, in many cases of simple common infections there is no fever. In these cases Fever Therapy can be very effective because it creates an artificial fever which brings more of the body's defenses into play. We find it quite helpful in those cases when infections such as colds, flu, sinus and ear infections or bronchitis have not produced a fever. Its beneficial effects are particularly noticeable with the more intense infections. You should not do Fever Therapy if you already have a fever, are pregnant, ever get headaches or other health problems with fevers or becoming over-heated, or have a chronic illness without first receiving the approval of your health care provider.

Preparations: While Fever Therapy looks much like a simple hot bath, it is much more. To be effective it must be done according to the instructions. You must have available an oral thermometer, something to wear that is absorbent, such as a heavy cotton robe and/or a sweat suit, and a bathtub with plenty of very hot water. At night before bed, or anytime when you will be undisturbed for a couple of hours, prepare a very hot bath. Be careful not to make the bath too hot in the beginning. Be sure to drink plenty of pure water before, during and after the treatment.

Step 1. Get into the bath and add more hot water until you get it as hot as you can stand it. [Precautions: Be very careful if you are doing this for a child! Regularly test the water to assure that he or she is not scalded. You may want to get into the bath with your child.]

Step 2. Take your oral temperature regularly during the time you are in the bath. After your temperature reaches 101 degrees Fahrenheit stay in the bath for additional 20 minutes. Your goal is to keep your body's temperature at that level for the full 20 minutes. Usually you will break into a heavy sweat by the time your temperature is up to the prescribed level. You may drink as much pure tepid water as you want but it should not be cold water.

Step 3. Get out of the bath after 20 minutes. Be very careful as you get out! Most people feel a little faint, so do not stand up too quickly. Dry off quickly, cover your head with a towel and put on the absorbent clothing (example: a heavy cotton robe, cotton sweat suit and socks).

Step 4. Quickly get into bed being careful not to get cool or chilled. You will feel uncomfortably hot and will usually be sweating profusely. This is exactly what you want. Stay covered up until Step 5. During this time the best thing to do is sleep.

Step 5. After 45 minutes to two hours you will have cooled off naturally to about your normal temperature. After you have mostly cooled off, but before you have gotten chilled, remove the wet clothing. At all times be careful not to get chilled. Only at this point is the treatment completed.

If you have an upper respiratory infection and are going to stay in bed after you have cooled off, you may follow the Fever Therapy with the Cold Sock Treatment. However, do not do the Fever Therapy and the Cold Sock Treatment simultaneously. You may repeat the Fever Therapy a couple of times a day during the worst of the infection. Fever Therapy can be helpful with almost any infection; however, it is particularly useful in the stages before the infection has "peaked" (before you have started to get well). In these earlier phases of the infection people usually find that it is extremely easy to break into the desired profuse sweat.

Warning: This self treatment should never be used if you are not completely sure of the diagnosis of your, or your child's, health problem and should only be used after your qualified health care provider has evaluated the condition. This advice is meant to augment and not replace the necessary care of a licensed primary care provider. If the health problem is serious enough that you would consider calling your primary care provider, you should still call him or her. However, even in those cases where other treatment is prescribed you will often find Fever Therapy helpful